Description
In 2024 Britain’s Home Office seemingly answered a question that children’s literature has been posing for years: is Paddington Bear British? In the weeks before the release of the movie Paddington in Peru, news broke out that the Home Office had issued the fictional bear an “official” passport, in keeping with a plot point in the new film.
Paddington’s Britishness is contentious, to say the least; arriving in the country as a stowaway in A Bear Called Paddington (1958), the question of his legal status is explicitly invoked several times in Michael Bond’s series of books, and never quite resolved. Adaptations of the stories have also dwelt on questions of immigration and identity—most significantly, the 2014 film, Paddington (dir. Paul King) explicitly links the bear with Britain’s Windrush generation.
At the same time, Paddington has increasingly become a figure associated with the British establishment, most notably in this (again, fictional!) bear’s relationship with Queen Elizabeth II. Paddington’s passport, and the popular response to this news, offer a way to explicate some of the contradictory and frustrating discourses around the figure of the immigrant in contemporary Britain.
