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C:\Documents and Settings\lproctor\Local SettingsNTemporary Internet Files\OLK8\Copyright - thesis (2).doc By :bii oayi; 39 www.b/issfittc , ‘THE BODY POLITIC AND THE FAMILY QUARREL: THE WAR OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE. METAPHOR AND VISUAL IMAGERY IN BRITAIN’ THOMAS LATHAM CANDIDATE FOR THE DEGREE OF PHD IN THE HISTORY OF ART AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON AUTUMN 2005 UMI Number: U592976 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U592976 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract: Name of Candidate: Latham, Thomas Edward Mere Title of Thesis: ‘The Body Politic and the Family Quarrel: The War of American Independence, Metaphor and Visual Imagery in Britain’ Text: The thesis examines images produced in Great Britain between c. 1765 and 1789, and relates them to general concerns about the relationship between Britain and the thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard of North America that declared their independence in 1776. Anglo-American conflict in this period was frequently conceptualized through metaphors that imagined events as an attack on the body politic or a quarrel within the wider British family. The thesis is concerned with the connections between these metaphors through artists’ embodiments of Great Britain and her colonies, principally as Britannia and an American Indian, and the ways in which they were contextualized by contemporary social, political and cultural experience. The various gender and generational permutations of the conflict metaphorized as a family quarrel relate the colonial relationship to wider contemporary concerns about the relationships between parents and children. Similarly the figurative division of the transatlantic community was imagined as the literal dismemberment of the British body politic, and contextualized through medical discourse and practice. As a civil war the conflict was often conceptualised as a quarrel between male members of the family or a culinary attack on the colonial body politic. The entry of the European powers to the conflict seems to have brought about a trend away from the conceptualization of the war as a family quarrel. The entry of Spain to the war in 1779 destabilized this metaphor’s narrative and gradually caused it to be replaced with other figures revealing a switch in perception from civil war to a more traditional view relating to the balance of power within Europe. Furthermore, the thesis suggests that the Franco-American treaties of 1778 and resultant military alliance were significant steps in the process whereby Anglo-American colonists came to be regarded as foreigners rather than fellow Britons. Table Of Contents Acknowledgements 5 1. Introduction 9 2. The Body Politic 37 3. The Family Quarrel - Britannia and her Daughter 70 4. The Prodigal Son - Declarations of Independence 107 5. The Balance of Power 139 6. The Dismemberment of Britannia 171 7. Britannia’s Blood 197 8. Sibling Rivalries 221 9. Conclusion 245 Bibliography 270 List of Illustrations 3 99 Illustrations 421 Acknowledgements: First of all I owe a great deal to my supervisors Professors David Bindman and Stephen Conway, who guided this project from the beginning and helped me to turn a couple of sentences into an entire thesis. They showed interest in my research, encouraged me to take risks, pulled me back from taking the wrong risks, suggested possible lines of research and prevented me from making some rather obvious mistakes (any remaining mistakes are my own). The staff of the History and History of Art Departments at University College London in general deserve some thanks for putting up with my loitering in their corridors for more than four years (especially Dr Claire Wilkinson, Dr Tom Gretton, Professor Helen Weston, and Diana Dethloff). Prior to that, the same would be true of the History of Art departments at the University of Leicester (Carol Charles, Professor Phillip Lindley, Nicholas Watson, Professor Alison Yarrington, Dr Thomas Frangenberg and Dr Geoff Quilley) and Aarhus Universitet, Denmark (Lars Kiel Bertelsen and Maria Fabricius Hansen). The other postgraduate students at UCL have been a constant source of support and challenging ideas, in particular I owe much to those whose areas of interest overlap chronologically with my own: Dr Richard Clay, Dr Richard Taws, Sue Walker, Zoe Kahr, Mercedes Ceron-Pefia and Emily Richardson. I would especially like to thank Emily for looking after things whenever I was in America conducting my research, and for being such a good listener. Material and ideas from chapter five were previously published in the journal OBJECT, and I would like to thank the editors for their many helpful suggestions, as well as the external validator Gill Perry. 6 I would like to thank Dr Emma Barker for her comments at my upgrade seminar, as well as those in attendance who were both encouraging and challenging. Similarly, I would like to thank Professors Diana Donald and William Vaughan for agreeing to be my final examiners. A variety of conferences and institutions allowed me the opportunity to test out some of the ideas and material in this thesis before finally committing everything to the printer, and I thank them and the audiences who made such helpful comments. The Arts and Humanities Research Board awarded me funds in order to pursue both my master and doctoral studies for which I am extremely grateful. A number of institutions in the United States of America also kindly awarded me with fellowships to enable me to travel and use their collections. I spent a very enjoyable month in 2003 at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, and I would like to thank Maggie Powell, Susan Walker, Marielle Mudgett-Olson, Cindy Roman, Lenore Rouse, Anna Malicka and Jim Cassidy, as well as the other fellows in residence in August 2003 Karen Junod and Dr Luisa Cale. As well as being a valuable resource in its own right, the Paul Mellon Centre in London provided me with a fellowship that enabled me to spend three months based at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Many people provided help, advice and suggestions during my stay there, including Julia Alexander, Julia Hyde, Susan Brady, Lori Misura, Phil Basner, Diana Donald, Marcia Pointon and Jason Schron. The John D. Rockefeller Jr., Library (part of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation) gave me a fellowship enabling me to use their collection for a month in 2005, and thanks are due to Inge Flester, Margaret Pritchard, Laura Barry, Gail Greve and Jim Horn. Thanks to a Batten Fellowship from the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Virginia, I was able to spend March 2005 based at the Jefferson Library. I would like to thank everyone there, but especially Andrew O’ Shaughnessy, Sanders Goodrich, Anna Berkes and Eleanor Sparagna. I also owe thanks to Paul Babbitt at the University of Virginia, who helped me through an increasingly complicated US visa application process. The Maryland Historical Society awarded me a Lord Baltimore Fellowship to visit their collection in Baltimore, Maryland, in April 2005 and to use their H. Furlong Library Baldwin library. I would like to thank all the staff there who offered assistance and suggestions,