By my hilt I believe that the men of England are all in France already, and that what is left behind are in sooth the women dressed up in their
paltocks and hosen."
In his chapter on Robert
Paltock's The Life and Adventure of Peter Wilkins (1750), Fitting's purpose is chiefly to prove that this work, regardless of what other commentators have said about it, is not set in a subterranean world but involves merely a brief transit through one to reach the novum.
While this is clearly epitomized in writings by Rousseau,
Paltock, Richardson, and Scott, it is even more evident in eighteenth-century somatopias.