Snatched from the sea: The survival ofPeter Wilkins

Children's Literature in Education, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1990

Pete r M e r c h a n t has written in CLE 18(4) on Lorna Doone and in 20(1) on heroism and sacrifice in Victorian literature for the young. His research interests lie in the 18th and 19th centuries; he teaches at Christ Church College, Canterbury, in Kent, England.

Peter Merchant

S n a t c h e d f r o m the Sea: The Surv iva l o f P e t e r W i l k i n s

A. H. Bullen, P re face to Peter Wilkins

Robert Paltock's novel The Life a n d Adven tures o f Peter Wilkins , first publ i shed in 1750, begins as arrestingly as any b o o k ever has. An old man unable to swim drops, out o f the blue, into the South Atlantic and is hauled aboard a passing ship just in t ime to save h im f rom drowning. One might suppose so power fu l an opening sufficient to secure, in any age, a sizable readership. Palpably, however, this is no longer pe rmi t t ed to Paltock. Peter Wi lk ins nowadays is a novel in distress, whose hold on life has g rown as weak as its gasping hero 's . Its need of a lifeline, as it sinks steadily into obscu- rity, seems no less urgent than his.

Peter Wilk ins was never so imper i led before. True, it has always been f i rmly excluded f rom the inner sanc tum of li terary culture. But it p rospe red for m a n y years in the marginal category of the children's chapbook , where it appeared to have found its niche. There is also record, among bound edit ions of Peter Wilkins, of several specially p repared children's versions. A. H. Bullen's 1883 preface accordingly tells us that Peter Wi lk i~s in Victorian t imes was " f requent ly issued, entire or mutilated, in a popu l a r form." A related deve lopmen t has to be inferred f rom Bullen's who l ly plausi- ble recol lect ions of pan tomimes based u p o n the book .

Peter Wilkins, it must be said, is a ra ther more h ighbrow w o r k than its his tory may suggest, and it is not by direct authorial designat ion that it has been so often p laced in the hands of the young. What has h a p p e n e d to the novel follows naturally enough, however, f rom the general tenor of its initial presenta t ion by Paltock and his pub-

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68 Children's Literature in Education

Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler

lishers. They seemed happy to present it as mains t ream entertain- men t but minor i ty l i te ra ture- -an audacious alternative to what , in 1750, were c la imed to be the prevailing canons of taste:

The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversi- fied only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.

Thus Samuel Johnson in The Rambler for March 31, 1750. In De- cember of that year, Paltock's title page was announcing, as episodes in Peter Wilkins, the following:

His Shipwreck near the South Pole; his wonderful Passage thro' a subterraneous Cavern into a kind of new World; his there meeting with a Gawry or flying Woman, whose Life he preserv'd, and after- wards married her; his extraordinary Conveyance to the Country of Glums and Gawrys, or Men and Women that fly. Likewise a Descrip- tion of this strange Country, with the Laws, Customs, and Manners of its Inhabitants, and the Author's remarkable Transactions among them.

There are some very canny marke t ing strategies in opera t ion here, translated into the cus tomary str ident sales talk of eighteenth- century title pages. Peter Wilkins is immedia te ly marginal ized for many readers by Paltock's t ransparent refusal to "exhib i t life in its t rue state," and the book ' s downr igh t defiance of the critical estab- l i shment is then left to b e c o m e its at traction and to de te rmine its audience. To sections of the public unwill ing to endorse (or unable to unders tand) the Johnson ian key words true and daily and really, Paltock's " w o n d e r f u l . . . e x t r a o r d i n a r y . . , s t r a n g e . . , remarkable" will read like the heads of a glorious riposte. And the grand adjecti- val arpeggio wi th which they play Peter Wilkins in is fully justified by what awaits us in the novel proper.

After an edi tor 's note purpor t ing to be wr i t ten by "a Passenger in the Hector," we hear of Peter Wilkins's life and adventures " f r o m his o w n Mouth." The old man w h o tumbled f rom the sky volun- teers an explanat ion of " the surprising Manner of his falling amongs t us" which turns into a comple te autobiography. The re- sulting m e m o i r occupies f i f ty- two chapters, in two volumes, and at first contains nothing ostentat ious or strange. Before Wilkins takes to the sea, there is t ime for his predictable marr iage to the plainly named Patty and then the no less predictable mis for tune of losing his estate.

The s tory next progresses through the various hazards of the high seas to the hero ' s adventures wi th Glanlepze the African. The lions and crocodiles of Africa are fol lowed by sh ipwreck off Patagonia,

Snatched f rom the Sea 69

and Wi lk inswthrea tened alike by " sha rp Weather" and giant e e l sm is suddenly a lone in his struggle to survive. It is at this po in t that Paltock, making the major move which he has wai ted ten chapters to make, pushes the s tory clean off the map. Wilkins is n o w sucked into the awful and subl ime "subter raneous Cavern" that the title page was proclaiming, and after a journey not quite to her center, mo the r earth drops him at last on the paradisal island of Grandevolet.

Here, in a convenient grotto, he has no choice but to make his home. Paltock uses the sequence to pay that scrupulous at tent ion to the ord inary practicalit ies of deser t island l iv ing- -every th ing f rom carpen t ry to c o o k e r y - - w h o s e main value, o f course, is as a persua- sive pre lude to the much less ordinary. Fishing in a lake, Wilkins soon trawls up a "great Beast f ish" wi th whir l ing fins. In the next chapter, a beautiful female comes f rom " the Count ry o f . . . Men and Women that f ly" to land wi th a t h u m p on his roof. This is the far f rom plainly n a m e d Youwarkee. Wilkins discovers her to have no clothes but her wings, exposing an ana tomy which puzzles h im gravely; and w h e n he revives her wi th madeira, she answers h im in "a Language I had no Idea of."

Wilkins, however, and the reader wi th him, must gradually get some not ion of Youwarkee 's language. She refers to the curious cover ing which is also her means of flight as a Graundee, and to hersel f as a Gawry. From n o w on we will be reading, not about men and w o m e n , b u t - - ' ' w o n d e r f u l " and " r emarkab le" to r e l a t e - -abou t Glums (or Glumms) and Gawrys. With romance leading inevitably on to a fo rm of marriage, Peter Wilkins, the Corn i shman and one- t ime husband to Patty, will at a stroke assume the more unusual title o f " t he Glumm Peter, Barkett to Youwarkee."

He and Youwee, as he affect ionately calls her, are quick to start a family. This supplies Paltock wi th one of his least esoteric subjects ( " the Author 's Method of treating his Children"), and it gives Wilkins, w h o has already managed to br ing Youwarkee to a "ra- t ional Knowledge" of God, the chance to establish "a little Chris- tian Church in my o w n House" by doing the same to their sons and daughters. He has gone native, we are thus assured, only in the mos t superficial respects. He has altered none of his beliefs and few of his habits, and he will make it his b o u n d e n duty to europeanize as many Glumms and Gawrys as beat a pa th to his door. When he has done wi th the docile Youwarkee- -dress ing her up as " m y Country- w o m a n , " in the fetching "English G o w n " that she made at his in s t ance - - she is unrecognizable even by her o w n brother, Quan- grallort.

The second vo lume of Peter Wilkins takes the hero into terr i tory still s t ranger and more exotic than his n o w colonized deser t island.

70 Children's L i t e ra ture in E d u c a t i o n

Percy Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel

He is invited to visit the Glumms and Gawrys in the Land of Flight itself, or Doorp t Swangeanti. To his "n igh sixteen Years" on the island of Grande~volet are to be added a fur ther dozen in the coun- t ry of m e n and w o m e n that fly. As might have been guessed, as the Glumms and Gawrys can cover up to "a Mile a Minute," their home-

] a n d is an " i m m e n s e Distance over Sea;" so Wilkins builds an elabo- rate flying chair to take h im there. With this con t rap t ion Paltock anticipates the Montgolf ier brothers by some thi r ty years.

Wilkins's t ransactions in the Land of Flight are indeed remarkable. After he has unmasked a traitor, thwar ted an a rmed rebell ion against King Georigett i , a n d - - i n an episode given a vivid accom- panying i l lus t ra t ion--di rec ted f rom his flying chair the course of a sensational aerial battle, he enjoys so dazzling a poli t ical rise that he sees "greater D e f e r e n c e . . . pa id to me, than to the Crown." Wilkins is n o w not just a p ioneer of aviation, but a considerable statesman, recognized as the father of the Swangeantine nation. He procla ims the abol i t ion of slavery; and this process of educat ing and enlight- ening the native p o p u l a t i o n - - " o p e n i n g their v iews by little and little' ' - - con t i nues w h e n he destroys their graven images and sets about translating the Bible " in to the S w a n g e a n t i n e Tongue." He s inglehandedly revolutionizes industry and agriculture, introducing the peop le to "several ext raordinary Conveniences they had never before had." Part legislator and par t d iplomat , he arranges a very expedient marr iage for the king and conducts an aggressive foreign pol icy which includes the annexat ion of Mount Alkoe. Eventually, little or nothing remains for Wilkins to accompl ish . He can therefore opt, w h e n Youwarkee's death leaves h im a grieving widower, for an honorab le re t i rement to the coun t ry of his birth. Since the journey to England will require a cont r ivance " m u c h l ighter" than the original flying chair, he constructs a sort o f intercontinental air raft for the purpose ; and it is this which, at the start o f the novel, the " H e c t o r " shoots f rom the sky.

From any s um m ary of Peter Wi lk ins , it is easy enough to gather the reasons that literary historians have tended to treat the novel wi th a strain of condescens ion far more damaging to Paltock than John- son's p reempt ive critical strike. Since Defoe and Swift are com- m o n l y credited wi th an effective m o n o p o l y of Utopian fantasy and traveler 's tales and desert islands in e ighteenth-century fiction, mos t commenta to r s faced wi th a b o o k which depends so m u c h on these things as Peter Wi l k in s are bound to p r o n o u n c e it a mere p o o r relation of R o b i n s o n Crusoe (1719) and Gull iver ' s Travels (1726). In fact, the mot i f of the imaginary voyage, whose huge impor tance to the his tory of prose f ict ion has been demons t ra ted by Percy Adams, had a far wider currency in the eighteenth century than this v iew allows. (Among those w h o independen t ly tu rned to it, sus-

Snatched f r o m the Sea 71

Robert Crossley, "Ethereal Ascents"

Laurence Goldstein, The Flying Machine and Modern Literature, pp. 50-53

Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, I, 30

Mrs. Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, I, 122-24

pending his preference for "acc idents that daily happen , " was J ohns on himself.) Paltock, Swift, and Defoe s imply offer three very different and separate examples of its use, out o f a large n u m b e r that might be studied. Yet only riow, in a modes t m o v e m e n t of emanc ipa t ion begun by Robert Crossley and carr ied fur ther by Laurence Goldstein 's br ief discussion, is it becoming possible to uncoup le Peter Wi lk ins f rom Gull iver and f rom Crusoe. Routinely d ismissed as der ivat ive f r o m ei ther or b o t h o f those books , Paltock's novel has somet imes rated no more than a parenthesis in a paragraph on Swift or a footnote to a page about Defoe.

No one would deny that its incidental indebtedness to Defoe 's tale of adventure and Swift 's fabulous voyage is par t o f the t ruth about Peter Wilkins. H o w far it is fair to press the po in t is a difficult ques t ion of emphasis . It might be just as legit imate to cons t ruc t a different li terary history, por t ray ing Paltock not as a p lundere r o f Crusoe and Gull iver bu t - - a l t oge the r more honor i f i ca l ly - -as a pre- cursor of the romantics . Writing at the height o f the book ' s vogue, the romant ics not on ly gar landed Peter Wilk ins with critical praise but pa id it the subtler ho mage of li terary allusion. It could easily be argued, for instance, that Paltock's sixth chapter, wi th its gr ipping picture o f a ship 's c rew cast adrift and s lowly dying of thirst, lies beh ind the sh ipwreck scenes in Canto II o f Byron's D o n J u a n . Nor should we need the evidence of Coleridge's declared op in ion that Peter Wi lk ins " i s . . . a w o r k of u n c o m m o n b e a u t y " to see the same passage as part , at least, o f Paltock's p robable presence in The R i m e o f the A n c i e n t Mariner . ' Thomas Medwin interestingly r emember s the ten-year-old Shelley reading Peter Wilkins , and its subsequent appearance on Florence Marshall 's list o f " b o o k s read dur ing 1815 by Shelley and Mary" undoub ted ly helps to account for the narrative design of the novel that the latter started wri t ing a year after- ward. Peter Wi lk ins and Frankens te in share the same f rame s tory of the narrator, and e p o n y m o u s hero, p icked up at sea in cir- cumstances for wh ich "surpr iz ing" (Paltock) and "s t range" (Mary Shelley) are mild epithets.

It seems a shame, however, to have to seek such external sanc- tions for any w o r k of literature. In the end we belit t le Peter Wilk ins if we see it exclusively in terms ei ther o f the earlier books wh ich it invokes as precedents or o f the later ones for wh ich it is a stimulus. And we are likely in doing so to extract f rom the novel only those surface e lements that tend to s tamp it as yet ano ther p ic turesque travel nar ra t ive- -a t best, the apotheosis o f the seaman 's yarn. I f this were the limit o f Paltock's ambit ions, Peter Wi lk ins would very rapidly have been rendered redundant by the journals o f Captain Cook. Luckily it has qualities quite distinct f rom this, and a coher- ence pecul iar to itself, which will emerge w h e n we pull away the

72 Children's Literature in Educat ion

props o f li terary influence and let the novel stand for once entirely on its own.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chap. 4

The novel 's true themat ic concerns , mos t noticeably, are not as our p reconcep t ions might dictate. It would instead be my content ion that Paltock sets Peter Wilkins slightly apart f rom its supposed models by the successive incorpora t ion of a discourse on marr iage and an unusual ly extensive treatise on government , and therefore that for m u c h of the novel, whi le he cont inues to flirt wi th the extravagant t ravel-book tradition, he is actually embracing the in- tensely reflective m e d i u m of the great e ighteenth-century essayists. In the event we discover, hardly perhaps a more sober, but certainly a s om ewha t softer and more feminine b o o k than any k n o w n to the young David Copperf ield, whose avid perusal o f "a few volumes of Voyages and Travels" handed d o w n wi th his father 's fairly represen- tative e ighteenth-century l ibrary led to h im acting out the adventures of "Capta in Somebody, o f the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price." Paltock's is not a b o o k that can be so s t ra ightforwardly sustained by the heroic male adventurer, self-sufficient and div ided f rom his family. We soon sense that a very m u c h larger context than this is included.

Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1730-1780, I, 234

Paltock's discourse on marr iage unfolds in the first volume, against the background of wha t he has shown as his hero ' s g loomy per- sonal experience. Wilkins's shotgun wedding to Patty, c l inched for h im by severe financial pressures, suggests a singularly cynical v iew of men ' s mot ives in marrying, and so does his account of the grasp- ing s tepfather who, as if to prove that there are pirates of the land as well as o f the sea, t r icked h im out of his estate. In one sense Wilkins goes abroad in order to explore alternative styles of marriage, free f rom mercena ry considerat ions. Thus he spends his two years wi th Glanlepze and Zulika in Africa envying their "Love and Constancy . . . mutual Felicity . . . alternate J o y " as far super ior to anything that he and Patty had exper ienced: " I rep in 'd at the Happiness of my Benefactor, and at finding it was not my Lot to enjoy the same." However, as w h e n he later repines at being unable to fly, he is not long to be balked of his hear t ' s desire. All it takes is the sudden stroke of luck wh ich deposits Youwarkee on his roof. Wilkins not unnatural ly thinks _of her as " the Gift of Heaven"; in his " n e w World" of Grandevole t she gives h im a foretaste of paradise, and of the awaited "Change, f rom this to a different State of Life." She comes as a veritable godsend to h im and, according to Oliver Elton in 1928, also as a godsend to the reader. For " the very device that we might expect to spoil the story, the in t roduct ion of a Mrs. Crusoe, makes its charm."


United to Youwarkee, Wilkins himself n o w represents the ideal wh ich he and we had contempla ted in Glanlepze and Zulika. The promises exchanged, after a who le winter spent finding a language in wh ich to make them, move upon the same sent imental hinges of love and constancy: " I here make you a tender of all I am able to bestow, my Love and Constancy." Wilkins becomes a paragon o f "Tenderness and Affection," and Youwarkee is " the faithfullest and mos t loving Creature u p o n Earth." The uncertainties they share about the p rope r way for Youwarkee to d r e s s - - a n d w h e t h e r she may venture out a lone - - touch ing ly reveal a young couple whose pr ide is solely in each o ther and who, however d im their not ions of sexual equality, at least enjoy a perfec t reciproci ty of feeling. Paltock is pe rhaps at his best, and arguably comes closest to exhibit- ing life in its true state, w h e n he develops some m o m e n t of "mutua l Felicity" be tween man and wife (or father and daughter, in the case of Youwarkee 's reunion wi th Pendlehamby) as a dramatic expression of basic h u m a n emot iona l patterns. His sensit ivity to these is un impai red by his having set h imself to s tudy t h e m where the reader never saw them studied before: not at h o m e but in Africa; not in fact in humans at all, but in winged humanoids .

The very first such dislocations of expectat ions in Peter Wilkins prolept ical ly set up the book ' s Swangeantine climax, by training the reader to see Youwarkee and Wilkins in a double perspect ive. Even as our imaginat ion warms to their sweet intercourse o f looks and smiles, the removal overseas obliges us to p o n d e r it as a fo rm of colonial encounter. The subtext to the romance is a compar i son of cultures, wh ich the second vo lume of the novel serves to extend and to generalize. Here, Wilkins turns f rom the mino r t r i umph of put t ing Youwarkee in English dress to the major challenge of simi- larly t ransforming Youwarkee 's coun t ry and people. The interest o f the narrative will again depend on the gift to the hero of certain materials that he is sure to find "capab le of great Improvemen t , " but the scale is so altered that he n o w has a who le nat ion as his laboratory, instead of just having a grotto. Some of his a t t empted improvement s are commerc ia l or env i ronmen ta l - -he builds a city wi th no more apparent effor t than had gone into the renovat ion of his t iny island h o m e - - a n d others are in the field of mora l and religious educat ion. "You have enl ightened me more than ever I was before," his father-in-law tells him, " a n d have pu t me on a new way of thinking; for wh ich I am to re turn you many Thanks." Wilkins h imsel f at t imes seems rather less conf ident o f deserving thanks for his reforms f rom the peop le of a contentedly backward nation, wh ich "has subsisted eleven thousand Years" w i thou t tak- ing any lessons f rom Europe: " I am afraid, I have put t hem u p o n another way of thinking, tho ' I a imed at wha t we call civilizing of them."


Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, chap. 7.

This is the nub, obviously, o f Paltock's treatise on government . His hero must t ry to w o r k out wha t it is that mos t profits a nation, and his reader must seek to de te rmine the rightness or o therwise of the " n e w way." The b o o k queries whe the r " w h a t we call civil izing" o ther countries, and what is called " i m p r o v e m e n t " or (another of Wilkins's words) "redress ," really require terms different and less posi t ive than these. Thus it is that Wilkins the self-styled "Re- f o r m e r " is shown to instruct the popula t ion in the worsh ip of God, by campaigning to "break the Bondage of Idolatry," but insofar as another branch of re form entails supplying " n o t o n l y . . , the Con- veniences, but Superfluities o f Life" he is also shown to have in- s t ructed it in the worsh ip of Mammon. A par t o f wha t he has to teach is thoroughly good: "Books , Writing, and Letters." When he teaches the Swangeantine peop le about the t echnology of destruc- tion, however, and makes them "Masters . . . o f the Mystery of Powder and Ball," his knowledge is perhaps more to be pi t ied than their ignorance. Such episodes tend to unde rmine Wilkins's creden- tials as a br inger of improvement . They hark back to the sharp self- doubt that first induced h im to repent o f having despised " the p o o r Blacks in Africa" and having reserved such titles as "Master-pieces of the Creat ion" and "Heavens pecul iar Favouri tes" for the likes of himself. In this respect there is an ambivalence about the novel, and a ready hospital i ty to oppos ing schools of thought , wh ich may have underp inned its popula r i ty in the romant ic and Victorian per iods. In essence, Peter Wilkins the benef icent improver of D o o r p t Swan- geanti is precisely the sort o f paternalist hero that Martin Green in his chapter on "Popular Literature and Children's Literature" de- scribes as typical o f the nineteenth century: explorer, missionary, engineer, and colonial administrator. Yet at the same time. Paltock does just enough, wi th Glanlepze in particular, to suggest the bold Byronic twist that at tr ibuted to pr imit ive countr ies and cultures a paradoxical ability to civilize Civilization's son.

It is scarcely surprising that Paltock should create so m u c h more tension and contradic t ion in touching the theme of government than in his t rea tment of marriage. The r e c o m m e n d e d pa th to con- jugal love and constancy in Peter Wilkins was necessari ly that of the Church, but there are no such simple prescr ipt ions for wha t Wilkins undertakes in Doorp t Swangean t i - -wh ich is to "consol i - date," in any ways felt fit, the "Peace and Happiness" of the state. The disappearance of consensus dangerously enfeebles the book ' s control l ing vision of harmony, which, once transferred out o f the domes t ic arena and into a polit ical context , was always b o u n d to b e c o m e deeply problematic. Paltock therefore shows some considerable courage in even beginning to pursue it, a courage all the more impressive because by doing so he of course runs the addi- t ional risk of disappoint ing the sensat ion seekers among his reader-


ship. Marriage and government are not the most saleable of subjects. Love and constancy, and peace and happiness, are concerns far more nebulous and theoretical than the shipwreck and such like which we saw trailed on the title page.

But even the most demanding of readers will wor ry only briefly. Paltock's early chapters offer ample assurance that, however ab- stract his topics may become, the novel 's first-person narrative is such as always to preserve and reinforce the sense of a concrete fictional world. Refracted through any other intelligence than Wilkins's, the story might have soared up into the empyrean like a Glumm or Gawry on the wing. As it is, the hero has been given a thoroughly practical and prosaic turn of mind, and a l ik ing--or even a n e e d - - f o r the kind of solid accumulations of detail that p roduce one vividly realized scene after another. He is repeatedly shown opening chests or bundles and cataloguing their contents. In one such search, he discovers

a silver Punch or Wine Can and a Ladle, then a gold Watch, a Pair of Scissars, a small silver Chaffing-dish and Lamp, a large Case of mathematical Instruments, a Flagellet, a Terrella, or globular Load- stone, a small Globe, a Dozen of large silver Spoons, and a small Case of Knives and Forks and Spoons.

On another occasion,

I found a blue Cloth laced Coat double-breasted, with very large gold Buttons, and very broad gold Buttonholes, lined with white Silk; a Pair of black Velvet Breeches, a large gold-laced Hat, and a Point Neckcloth, with two or three very good Shirts, two Pair of red- heeled Shoes, a Pair of white, and another of scarlet Silk Stockings, two silver-hilted Swords, and several other good things.

Evidently, Paltock yields nothing to Defoe in his insistence upon th e present and tangible object.

Nor does he yield anything to Swift in respect of the imperturbable persuasiveness which both writers achieve by their thorough thinking through of a fantastic initial hypothesis. Flying machines be- longed in 1750 to the realm of science fiction, but the const ruct ion of the chair that will convey Wilkins to Doorp t Swangeanti is de- scribed as minutely as if it were an operat ion no less logical, and no harder to repeat, than Glanlepze's with the stick and reeds in Africa. A story involving "Men and Women that f ly" assumes an obviously impossible premise, but the narrative is as precise about the me- chanics of fitting the human frame for flight as, with Wilkins in his grotto, it managed to be about the rudiments of plastering. There are even several engravings added to the text, which meticulously detail " the Structure and Mechanism of the Wings of the Glums and


Added to the text of Paltock's novel were six plates with the sig- nature "Boitard" (from the first edition pub- lished by Robert Dodsley, 1750). Here, catching his subject just prior to takeoff, Boitard illustrates Paltock's conception of the Graundee.

Tab.][I[.

Gawrys . " W i t h o u t these, " o u r His tory had b e e n ve ry incomplea t , " and they are a m o n g a n u m b e r o f visual aids w h i c h Pal tock uses to l end an air o f authent ic i ty . A street p lan o f Brandleguarp , the Swan- geant ine capital, is par t o f the same appara tus o f explana t ion .

A cons is tent emphas is on d o c u m e n t a r y evidence, and o n the n e e d to contextual ize, shapes the w h o l e f ict ion. A p o t t e d h i s to ry o f D o o r p t Swangeant i glosses its poli t ics , and Pal tock takes the fact that the c o u n t r y has a re l igion all o f its o w n to imp ly that he mus t


Barbara Hardy, "'Robinson Crusoe,'" CLE, 1977, 8/1, 3-11

also give it a corresponding creat ion myth. In concoct ing the strange new language that readers of M o r e - - o r o f Orwel l - -wi l l recognize as part and parcel of the Utopian idea, he furnishes specimens and he appends a glossary in which essential terms are translated back into English. All of the book 's invented systems, f rom the anatomical to the linguistic, have by this t ime been rendered wi th such verisimilitude as to blur the dividing lines be tween invention and true report . It is tempting to take the hero 's original journey into the "subterraneous Cavern," which is a literal slippage f rom the fixed facts of a real geographical locat ion to an island purely of the imagination, as an exact epi tome of Paltock's fictional method.

To have grasped the distinctive strategies o f Peter Wi lk ins will allow us to establish more definitely where its appeal is ul t imately ad- dressed. For Paltock turns out to have contr ived a b lend of outland- ish fantasy wi th solid detail and painstaking'verisimilitude which, if it belongs to one class of imaginative literature more than to any other, belongs preeminent ly to the fiction that children enjoy reading and indeed enjoy composing. Children's eternal delight in the pseudoscientif ic descr ipt ion of u n k n o w n species which are part animal and par t human, in highly organized secondary worlds that run parallel to the one they themselves inhabit, in made-up lan- guages that obey some but not all o f the rules of their own, is e loquent ly attested to by Lilliput and Brobdingnag, and Angria and Gondal, and Carroll 's "Jabberwocky." With so many of the same imaginative and intellectual satisfactions built into Peter Wilkins, there was always a strong presumpt ion that once young readers were in any way drawn to the b o o k - - b y pantomimes, perhaps, or by some "mut i la ted" popula r iza t ion- - they could be w o n over in very large numbers. Paltock, therefore, would certainly benefi t f rom a fuller appreciat ion of what his novel not only offered to this sector in 1750 but cont inues to offer today.

Barbara Hardy's discussion of Robinson Crusoe is ext remely help- ful here. She senses an intriguing cont inui ty with the exper ience of the child on the level of the "cons t ruc t ional games," and games of make-believe, in Defoe's story. This is probably even t ruer of Peter Wilk ins than of Crusoe itself. The games in Peter Wi lk ins are car- r ied fur ther still, while the first-person singular, of course, remains in the narrative as every reader 's ticket to easy imaginative partici- pat ion in them. We align ourselves thereby wi th a narrator playing the role of undisputed king of the ca s t l e - - " the absolute and sole Lord" of the island of Grandevolet . Doorp t Swangeanti proves a place just as amenable to his, and our, fantasies of dominat ion. Wilkins deploys his Swangeantine artillery corps like a pocketful of tin soldiers, and he rearranges the country 's political institutions like the contents of a toy cupboard. His "cons t ruc t ional games"


then culminate spectacularly in the p lanning and building o f the new city of Stygena, and wi th this Paltock penetra tes to wha t some would say was the very hear t of children's play. In Edith Nesbit 's Wings and the Child (1913), a seventy-page exposi t ion of the "history and theory of the building o f Magic Cities" measures the cen- trality that she, at least, wanted parents and teachers to give to the subject.

Episodes such as those ensure that Peter Wilkins will be capable of speaking very directly even to quite young children, and a l though there are also episodes in the novel which mus t have given pause to its abridgers and revisors ("an Intr igue wi th a S e r v a n t - M a i d . . . The Author 's Disappoin tment at first going to bed wi th his new Wife"), these are more minor and less frequent. In the end, far f rom having to be kept back f rom interested young readers, Peter Wilkins de- serves but hardly needs c o m m e n d i n g to them; it is so wr i t ten as effect ively to c o m m e n d itself. In par t this is achieved by the way in wh ich forms of discourse familiar to any child are r ep roduced in- tact wi th in the n a r r a t i v e - - w h e n Wilkins recalls "his Advice to his Son and Daughter," or tells of teaching Lasmeel h o w to write, or showing Pendlehamby how to tell the time. The readers are regularly called upon to cast themselves as pupils to the instructing, or guid- ing, narrator, and the crucial desert island sequence may then be read bo th as a shared game and as a course of fatherly advice directed (since essential survival skills intersect, Swiss Family Robinson style, wi th basic principles of housekeeping) at a mixed audience of small girls and boys. Halfway through Peter Wilkins, moreover, there is a remarkable reflexive irony which sees the recept ion of the text by such an audience actually becoming par t o f Paltock's script. The hero is shown repackaging the very adventures which were shared wi th us in the chapter on Africa as so many bed t ime stories for his young daughter and sons: "Daddy, what did you do w h e n the Crocodi le came after you out o f the W a t e r . . . "

This is a repackaging which could go on for as long as the novel itself. We k n o w wha t the children do not, that two bed t ime stories not just bigger but very m u c h bet ter than Peter Wilkins in Africa are wait ing to be told: Peter Wilkins on Grandevole t and Peter Wilkins in Doorp t Swangeanti. There is a pecul iar fascinat ion in the telling of these, bo th because each coun t ry visited exhibits the bejeweled beauty characteristic o f Utopias that are geographical ly rather than historically remote and because the arrivals at each are in themselves breathtaking concep t ions on Paltock's part . First, Grandevo- let is an island as magical as Ballantyne's coral island or Barrie's "delec table" Neverland; it boasts a lake "as clear as Chrysta l" amid a w o o d " c o m p o s e d of the mos t charming f lowering Shrubs that can be imagined." "This mos t delightful Place" is succeeded wi th


Leigh Hunt, A Book for a Corner, I, 70

no sense of ant icl imax by Doorp t Swangeanti , a Land of Flight wh ich seems also to f low wi th milk and honey and m e a t s - - " t h e first Count ry I was ever in, where the Fish and Fowl grew on Trees." The rash o f super la t ives into w h i c h the p rose was sent by Youwarkee ( "no th ing u p o n Earth could be more capable of exciting Passion than her Charms") then breaks out afresh over the gracious Swangeant ine capital: " fo r the Magnificence of the Apar tments and Sculpture, no Part o f the Universe can p roduce the like."

Wilkins travels in a manne r which per fec t ly accords, on bo th occa- sions, wi th the wonders that will greet h im w h e n he arrives. The "Passage thro ' a subterraneous Cavern" that brings h im to Gran- devolet is not idly t e rmed "wonder fu l , " for it is a journey well-nigh inconceivable in e ighteenth-century terms; the closest equivalent, d rawn inevitably f rom the rougher edges of children's play, might be a helter-skelter run d o w n a waterslide. Paltock t rumps even this, however, in the episode of his hero ' s "ex t raord ina ry Conveyance" to Doorp t Swangeanti, w h i c h - - t h a n k s to the flying chai r - - i s suf- fused wi th the exci tement of the fairground. The novel has, in fact, heavily relied on the magic of m o v e m e n t through space to give it its imaginative power. H o w m u c h p o w e r was divined by Leigh Hunt w h e n - - e n t h u s i n g over Peter Wilk ins in an early Victorian anthol- ogy of favorite prose and verse ex t rac t s - -he represented Paltock's invent ion bo th of the flying chair and of the so-called Graundee as a thrilling raid upon bur ied memories :

how founded in nature itself is the human desire to fly! We do so in dreams: we all long for the power when children: we think of it in poetry and in sorrow.

Freud, o f course, would later sort out the cause and effect in this and make the flying dreams that Leigh Hunt ment ions a direct reflex of the childish longing to fly. But Paltock, 150 years before Freud's s tudy of dreams, saw h o w another kind of fantastic l anguage- - tha t o f fictional na r ra t ive - -migh t be conver ted to the s tatement of a longing which he could conf ident ly expect to strike a special chord wi th his readers because, on some level, he too recognized it as essentially childish. It is at least a happy accident o f this project , as well as a re f inement wor thy of Swift, that graundee implies under- age anagrammatical ly; everything else about the paraphernal ia of flight in Peter Wi lk ins implies it symbolically.

No wonder , then, that Wilkins in his flying chair should seem to hover above m u c h children's f ict ion of the present century as a suggestive ancestral image. The child characters in Edith Nesbit 's The Phoen i x a n d the Carpet, in Enid Blyton's Adventures o f the Wishing-Chair, and in Hilda Lewis's The Ship That Flew are all, in


similar fashion to Wilkins, made passengers on some magic flight. But there is still no more exhilarating expression of the fantasy than we mee t at its earliest beginnings, w h e n Paltock's hero is bo rne rapidly aloft in his chair and carr ied to such giddy heights that " y o u could not distinguish the Globe of the Earth but by a sort o f Mist." The idea of flight is a t tended here by a sense of aspiration, transcen- dence, and the gratification of wishes wh ich is far more significant than it may appear. Readers w h o v iew the idea of flight in literature through more m o d e r n pr isms (Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or Peter Pan teaching Wendy " h o w to jump on the wind ' s back," or the eagles and skylarks of romant ic poe t ry) will a lmost certainly find it somewha t trite. Given the very different li terary image of flight which obta ined in his o w n per iod, however, Paltock's emphasis is a revolut ionary one. We need only recall h o w flying in Gul- liver's Travels was exper ienced not as release, or as quest, but as nightmare: the terrifying ordeal o f the flight wi th the eagle, the flying island that threatens "universal Destruct ion." And Johnson , nine years on f rom Peter Wilkins, m e m o r a b l y der ided the fantasy of flight in a single chapter of Rasselas.

Strictly speaking, until there are b i rdmen in the skies, we cannot say that Johnson was wrong about the future and Paltock was right. Yet I want to avoid the absurdi ty of consider ing the conques t of the air in Peter Wilkins in the light o f scientific predict ion, since it seems to me that the real value of Paltock's inventions is not to science at all but to narrative theory. To tell, as Paltock does, o f a special "con t r ivance" by which a man s t rapped securely in his seat can be t ranspor ted an " i m m e n s e Distance" to u n k n o w n worlds awaiting explorat ion, and can be myster iously lifted out o f sequen- tial t ime (the peop le of D oorp t Swangeanti "have no Clocks") , is to create a mos t provocat ive coincidence in the defini t ions of flying machine and novel. Here, at the nerve center of Peter Wilkins, where the hero ' s marvelous chair flight is Paltock's p lo t material, the b o o k turns incisively in u p o n itself. It is hard to conceive of any closer approach than this to the paradoxical and unformula ted awareness which all wri ters and readers of f ict ion are likely to have of it as a means of imaginative enfranchisement , and of themselves as sedentary traveling compan ions on an ambit ious expedi t ion of discovery. Emblematically, Paltock has descr ibed the way we will read his story; w e - - t h o u g h sitting s t i l l - - f ly just as far, to see sights just as strange, as its hero is made to do. More than that, Paltock has descr ibed wha t all reading can be like, w h e n it contains as m u c h of discovery as of r e cogn i t i on - - and particularly, therefore, wha t children 's reading is bound to be like.

Peter Wilkins, I would n o w want to suggest, is someth ing rather more than just a late cont r ibut ion to the tradit ion of the imaginary


Tab N.I

From Volume 2 of Peter Wilkins, "the Figure of an aireal Engagement" and the only picture Paltock provides of his hero's flying chair. Wilkins (safely deposited on terra flrma) is shown "sitting in his Chair, and com- manding Victory."

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

voyage. Taken simply as that, it would still be an eminently worth- while piece of writing. But a novel in which the imaginary voyage being traced is both the hero 's and, in another sense, the reader 's might also merit attention as an early contr ibut ion to an even longer and more fruitful tradition. It might earn a place in the same self-conscious tradition of fiction reflecting upon its own processes which, in another ten years, would give the world Tris tram Shandy. In the middle of the eighteenth century, when the novel as we k n o w it was still in its comparative infancy, novelists were naturally interested in asking large preliminary questions about the composi t ion and recept ion of their chosen form; Peter Wi lk ins is challenging enough in places to propel a writer so unregarded, usually, as Robert Paltock to the very forefront of this important movement .

82 Children's Li terature in Educa t ion

Paltock, of course, is hardly helped in maintaining that posi t ion--or any posi t ion--by the fact that copies of Peter Wilkins, his only known novel, have for some time been well-nigh impossible to find. Not only does the book thus elude the young readers who probably would still be its ideal audience, but of necessity it has fallen, even among the professionally interested, to having no dis- cernible audience at all. Those years spent out of print seemed recently to be spelling the final submergence of Peter Wilkins. In particular, the loss of the definitive Oxford English Novels edition (the text from which my quotations are taken) was potentially over- whelming. The book's salvation now hangs on a paperback reissue of this edition, which--wi th a new introduction by James Gran- tham Turner--is due from Oxford University Press in April 1990; so Paltock's prospects may suddenly be much improved. It would be agreeable to believe that Peter Wilkins, as it battles the tide of neglect, can be kept afloat for a good while yet.

Notes

1. Henry Nelson Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 2, p. 337; John Robert Moore, "Col- eridge's Indebtedness to Paltock's Peter Wilkins," Modem Philology, 1933, XXXI, 79-83.

References

Adams, Percy, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lex- ington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983.

Crossley, Robert, "Ethereal ascents: Eighteenth-century fantasies of human flight," Eighteenth Century Life, 1982, 7, 55-64.

Elton, Oliver, A Survey of English Literature, 1730-1780 (2 vols.). London: Edward Arnold, 1928.

Goldstein, Laurence, The Flying Machine and Modern Literature. London: Macmillan, 1986.

Green, Martin, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Hunt, James Henry Leigh, ed., A Book for a Corner (2 vols.). London: Chapman & Hall, 1849.

Paltock, Robert, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (2 vols.), preface by A. H. Bullen. London: Reeves & Turner, 1884.

Paltock, Robert, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, ed. Christopher Bentley. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Snatched from the sea: The survival ofPeter Wilkins

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