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In September of 1746, a quack doctor by the name of Charles Hamilton was tried at the Somerset quarter-sessions for vagrancy. In the eyes of the law, Hamilton was a woman with the birth name of Mary Hamilton, and it was Hamilton's marriage to a young woman named Mary Price that precipitated the arrest.1
This was not an ordinary case of vagrancy. "Vagrancy," in the press surrounding this case, alluded to a sensational tale of fraudulent marriage, gender transgression, and sexual deception-a story picked up first by a local gossip paper and then by periodicals throughout the country. Hamilton was not simply arrested on the authority of a local Justice of the Peace responding to a complaint of an unknown beggar or suspected thief; instead, a group called the Corporation of Glastonbury (which included many of the town's wealthiest and most powerful inhabitants) conducted the prosecution on behalf of Mary Price, who likely had neither the financial means nor social influence required to bring such a prosecution herself.2 It is difficult to tell, from the sources that remain, exactly what role Mary Price had in the prosecution and what motivated her involvement.
As newspapers began to reprint accounts of the case, the story caught the attention of Henry Fielding. Fielding took the story presented by the newspapers and spun it into The Female Husband (1746), a picaresque criminal biography that expands Hamilton's story to include numerous fictional adventures and sexual intrigues. By reading The Female Husband as the story of a vagrant, not just the story of a "lesbian" or "female husband," I pursue a dual aim: to provide a richer understanding of what vagrancy meant for Fielding and his contemporaries, and to propose an approach to eighteenth-century histories of sexuality that refuses to understand sexuality in isolation from other interlocking modes of apprehending and disciplining bodies, desires, and animation. The logic naming a "female husband's" crime as vagrancy reveals a fundamental connection between eighteenth-century ideologies of labor and class mobil- ity and the discourses and practices of gendered embodiment we now study under the rubric of the history of sexuality. Labor, I aim to show, ought to be a central concern for histories of sexuality and for queer readings of eighteenthcentury texts, even if...