[THEATRE PLAYBILL] Peter Wilkins, or, The flying Indians.

London : W. Reynolds, 1827. Theatre playbill, single sheet (330 x 200 mm), advertising a production at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden on Tuesday May 8 1827 of the ‘Melo-Dramatic Romantic Spectacle, in 2 acts, founded on the fanciful Adventures of Peter Wilkins, or, The Flying Indians‘, giving a full list of the cast and a brief description of each scene, commencing with ‘The Loadstone Rock in the Pacific Ocean, on which the ship De la Cruiz is wrecked‘, and culminating in ‘The Extraordinary Ascension of Peter Wilkins, borne on the back of the Lasks, or Flying Slaves, attended by the whole tribe of Glums and Gawries‘.

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 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‘.