Unidentified photographer / artist
1853
Illustrated Passports

Magazine page
Google Books
Punch, Vol.XXIV, 1853, p.104.
 
ILLUSTRATED PASSPORTS.
 
Some ingenious individual has proposed that every foreign passport shall be stamped with a daguerreotype likeness of the bearer. This project is intended to aid in the detection of what may be termed the ugly customers who travel abroad; but it would perhaps be easy to put another and a false face upon the matter oy a few touches of the pencil. One great objection to the plan seems to be, that the artists who get their living by daguerreotype portraits would be ruined, if the Governments abroad should commence the practice of issuing a passport with a correct likeness included, for a few francs, to every traveller.
 
This is no doubt the age of Illustration; and the idea of bringing out passports with cuts may possibly tend to give some little popularity to a system which has, hitherto, been altogether unpopular. As nobody remains the same for any length of time, and as illness may frequently alter the features, it would be hardly fair to subject a traveller to suspicion, because the light happens to have gone out of his laughing eye, or the cheek tnat was plump when his portrait was taken, may have sunk so low as to have destroyed all resemblance. Should any case of the kind occur, the Passport System will begin to assume a new series of alarming features.
 
LL/36165