author
Robert Paltock
1697–1767
An English attorney turned novelist, he is remembered for a single strange and imaginative classic: The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a tale of shipwreck, hidden worlds, and winged people that later readers saw as an early forerunner of science fiction.
3 Audiobooks
The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Volume 1 (of 2)
by Robert Paltock
The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Volume 2 (of 2)
by Robert Paltock
The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Complete (Volumes 1 and 2)
by Robert Paltock
About the author
Born in 1697, Robert Paltock was an English writer and attorney. He is chiefly known for The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man, published in 1751, the book that secured his place in literary history.
Paltock worked as a lawyer and lived for a time in Clement's Inn before later moving to Lambeth. Although little else is firmly documented about his literary career, Peter Wilkins stood out for its mix of adventure, fantasy, and speculative invention, and it was admired by later writers including Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb.
He died in London on March 20, 1767. Today, he is often remembered less as a prolific man of letters than as the creator of one unusually vivid novel that bridged the worlds of travel romance, utopian fiction, and early imaginative literature.