Henry Fielding's proposals for an internal British passport system

Although Henry Fielding's political writings have long generated considerable scholarly interest, his detailed proposals for an internal British passport system have so far been neglected. From the point of view of impact, this is not surprising; unlike his police reforms (Downie 114), Fielding's reflections on the benefits of restricting the mobility of the lower classes had little immediate or long-term legislative impact. Nor is this neglect strange in purely quantitative terms; when discounting the author's wide-ranging survey of legal precedents, the passport suggestions themselves consist of just a handful of paragraphs in the 1753 pamphlet "A Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor." Nevertheless, these suggestions are important for an understanding of Fielding's politics as expressed in both his social commentary and his fictional works. As I argue in this essay, they not only represent one of the earliest, comprehensive designs of a British passport regime, departing from existing eighteenth-century settlement requirements by targeting the mobility of the poor in the abstract, as something inherently undesirable and politically suspect. The passport proposals also enable us to undercover a nexus of mobility and movement control that forms a central concern in Fielding's later writing. Finally, Fielding's advocacy of extensive movement control compels us to reinvestigate the relationship between the political pamphlets and the novels. At first glance, this relationship seems paradoxical since the former body of writing seeks to outlaw the unrestricted mobility that provides the narrative basis for the latter. However, as I suggest by way of conclusion, the push for movement control is also present in the fictional realm in the guise of formal strategies designed to contain the protagonists' itinerant ways.