Robert Paltock and the Refashioning of “Inkle and Yarico”
Peter V. Merchant, Christ Church College
Volume 9, no. 1, October 1996
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ABSTRACT
Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins, in the novel of the same name (1750), is as resourceful and ingenious a figure as eighteenth-century fiction has to show. One of his feats is to improvise a pair of spectacles out of “old Hat, pieces of Ram’s-horn,” and “an old crape Hatband.” This essay, though far luckier in the raw materials dealt it, attempts something similar. It grows out of the need I feel for some new lens through which to view and read Paltock’s extraordinary novel. For us, it suggests, the famous eighteenth-century story of Inkle and Yarico might become just such a reading aid. For Paltock himself, this story seems to have functioned as a vital stimulus to invention in the testing interim between his novel’s “Introduction” — where some shots which a ship’s captain speculatively fires at the sky bring “an elderly Man” mysteriously crashing down into the sea (p. 6) — and the eventual explanation (deferred for fifty-two chapters) of that most memorable of openings.
Read more recent ECF articles on Project MUSE, such as 28.2:
ECF issue 28.2 (Winter 2015-16) on MUSE
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