Like so many eighteenth-century novels. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1750) dropped stillborn from the press. According to the Monthly Review (December 1750). Peter Wilkins was a "strange performance indeed," seeming to be "the illegitimate offspring of no very natural conjunction betwixt Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe; but much inferior to the meaner of these two performances, either as to entertainment or utility. It has all that is impossible in the one, or improbable in the other, without the wit and spirit of the first, or the just strokes of nature and useful lessons of morality of the second." This anonymous reviewer accurately reflects the eighteenth century's indifference to Robert Paltock's only novel, which left it for nineteenth-century readers to discover the charms of a book described by Coleridge as a "work of uncommon beauty." In at least one respect, however, the Monthly Review is...