[THEATRE PLAYBILL] Peter Wilkins or, Harlequin and the Flying Women of the Loadstone Island

London : Savoy Printing Company [for the Drury Lane Theatre], [1860]. Theatre playbill, single sheet (510 x 240 mm, incomplete, lacking a section at the head with venue and date, the upper two-thirds tipped onto modern card), advertising a production staged at the Drury Lane Theatre, London, in late December 1860, of 'Peter Wilkins or, Harlequin and the Flying Women of the Loadstone Island', giving a full list of the cast, details of the production and a brief description of each scene, culminating in 'The Wonderful Flight of the Flying Islanders to their Aerial Home'. The play was part of the Drury Lane Theatre's Christmas pantomime season and each night's performance featured guest appearances by the celebrated actors, Mr Charles Kean and his wife Mrs Kean (Ellen Tree).

Peter Wilkins was an extremely popular fictional character who had supposedly learned the secret of flight from his time as a traveller in the South Seas. Productions of this aeronautical fantasy thrilled both English and American audiences during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These spectacular stage productions were based on Robert Paltock’s novel The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1751), in which the protagonist is marooned on Nosmnbdsgrutt, an island of flying people in the South Seas, and marries a 'flying woman', or 'Gawry'. This playbill is for a very late production of Peter Wilkins.