Robert Paltock
Robert Paltock was an English author and lawyer, born in 1697 in Little Hadham, Hertfordshire. After a challenging childhood marked by the early deaths of his parents, he attended Charterhouse School and eventually became an apprentice and later a member of the Middle Temple, where he developed a law practice. Paltock married Anna Skinner in 1729, and they had seven children, though only three survived infancy. His financial troubles deepened over the years, leading to significant difficulties by 1748.
Paltock is primarily known for his novel, "The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man," published anonymously in 1750. While it did not achieve success upon its release, it garnered attention later, influencing Romantic poets like Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The story features a shipwrecked hero who encounters a society of flying people, drawing parallels to works by Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Despite his literary contributions, Paltock's life ended quietly in 1767, leaving little trace until his work was rediscovered and celebrated in later years.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Robert Paltock
Writer
- Born: October, 1697 (baptized)
- Died: March 20, 1767
Biography
Robert Paltock was born in 1697, and was baptized in October at Little Hadham, Herts, England. His father, Thomas Paltock, died in 1701, and his mother, Anne, in 1711; he then attended Charterhouse School and was supported thereafter by friends of his mother’s family until 1714, when he was apprenticed to William Ballett of Clement’s Inn. He was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1719, having benefitted from a small inheritance when he came of age, then returned to Clement’s Inn in 1722, where he acquired chambers.
On June 13, 1729, Paltock married Anna Skinner; they had seven children, of whom four died in infancy. Paltock established a law practice in Back Lane, Lambeth, but it did not flourish; by 1748, he was in severe financial difficulties, from which he never fully extracted himself. Anna died on January 14, 1767, and Paltock died shortly afterwards on March 20, 1767, his passing apparently leaving no relic of is sojourn on Earth. In 1835, however, a sale by auction was held of books and manuscripts that had belonged to a publisher named Dodsley, among which was found an agreement for the purchase from Paltock of the copyright of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man, which had been published anonymously in 1750 (though dated 1751).
The novel in question had passed unnoticed at the time—if it was an attempt to make money, it failed dismally—but it had been reprinted in 1783, translations having appeared in the interim in France and Germany, and had become a great favorite of the Romantic poets. Robert Southey claimed to have taken some of the inspiration for The Curse of Kehama from it and Samuel Taylor Coleridge probably had it in mind when writing certain passages of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
An earlier allegation of Paltock’s authorship had been made in the Monthly Magazine in 1802, on the basis that the book’s dedication—to the same Elizabeth, Countess of Northumberland, to whom William Percy had dedicated his Reliques of English Poetry—was signed “R.P.” The proof sparked a hunt for other works bearing the same initials, but the only one that might be by Paltock is the exceedingly dull Memoirs of the Life of Parnese, a Spanish Lady (1751), whose dedication is to his second cousin.
The story of Peter Wilkins is clearly modeled on Daniel Defoe’s Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, with a light seasoning of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and a protagonist named after Bishop John Wilkins, who had popularized the idea of artificial human flight in his Mathematicall Magick (1648). Its hero, having been shipwrecked near the South Pole, passes through a subterranean cavern into the “Country of the Glumms and Gawrys, or Men and Women that fly.” The subsequent account of a romance between the hero and an injured Gawry became the belated prototype for hundreds of equally fanciful romances involving beautiful exotic brides. The description of the customs and folkways of the society of the people who have mastered the technology of flight is over-elaborate, but the fundamental conceit is fascinating and the book was retrospectively enshrined as a classic of imaginative literature.