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''A Prodigious Execution": The Confessional Politics Of Robert Paltock's The Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Patrick Mello

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The only extant eighteenth-century review of Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1750) compares the novel to both Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Robinson Crusoe (1719), claiming that Paltock attempts to blend qualities of those two books but fails because there is "no very natural conjunction" between them. The reviewer's judgment, however, seems excessively harsh-in fact, positioning Peter Wilkins between these two novels makes a great deal of sense. Like Crusoe, Peter Wilkinsfeatures a reasonable, Whiggish male protagonist who, through labor and solitude, undergoes a spiritual transformation while stranded on a deserted island. What …