PALTOCK, Robert

(1697-1767)

   UK lawyer and writer, known mainly for The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man: Relating Particularly his Shipwreck Near the South Pole; his Wonderful Passage Thro' a Subterranean Cavern into a Kind of New World; His There Meeting with a Gawry or Flying Woman (1751), which ranks in popularity as an 18th-century imaginary voyage behind only Daniel DEFOE's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726). After discovering a race of wingedpeople, Wilkins breeds with them and teaches them about civilization and the arts of war, while himself manufacturing a flying machine in which he returns, now an old man, to tell his tale. There have been many reprints of the novel, variously titled (e.g., The Unrivalled Adventures of that Great Aeronaut and Glum, Peter Wilkins 1802) and almost always cut.

   JC