This image is an illustration for Robert Paltock’s book, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man. The scene is not taken directly from the text, but portrays Peter, his children, and three of the flying men he encounters on his journey (Paltock 8). In 1834 Samuel Taylor Coleridge described The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins as “a work of uncommon beauty, and yet Stothard's illustrations have added beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's designs” (Coxhead 69). 

A man and two children stand in the doorway of a small wooden structure. Hovering over the structure are three beings with fin-like wings on their backs. The furthest flying figure (in the background) carries a musical horn. A basket and a gardening hoe lean against the building, and tree branches frame the image. The depiction in this image of figures that are simultaneously ordinary (human-looking) and strange (with wings) evokes the Romantic interest in the probability or improbability of undiscovered life forms, as well as in the real-life relevance or applicability of myth.

Stothard spent a good deal of his career illustrating works of literature, and some of the greatest engravers of his day reproduced his work. The simple, austere lines of the image almost hide the strangeness of the winged figures. Their presence is an example of the “uncanny”—“a class of frightening which leads us back to what is known and long familiar” (Freud 220). Despite their unsettling wings, these creatures are almost ordinary. They are also reminiscent of angels, but their wings are spiny rather than feathered. Their presence could refer to the ongoing debate in the Romantic era concerning the existence of miracles in myth, history, and even the present. As new scientific discoveries and an increasing interest in cataloguing and labeling the diversity of life emerged during this period, many also began to question what sorts of life might exist undiscovered (Pascoe 49).