SOURCE: Pascoe, Judith. “Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace.” In Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley, pp. 252-68. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995.

In the following essay, Pascoe contends that the daily literary and gossip journal, The Morning Post, was an ideal forum for Mary Robinson's poetry.

A contemporary poem characterizes the Morning Post of the early 1800s as a hodgepodge of gossip and political intrigue, providing a list of news items a reader of that journal might encounter:

Bonaparte, Paris fashions, Chapels, Cyprian assignations: Captain Sash, the sea-side shark— Slander's arrow shot i' th' dark. Villa of Rochampton Jew, Horrid murder done at Kew; Queries, critical corrections, Galvinistic resurrections. Treatise on the Moon's eclipse Paint for cheeks, and salve for lips.(1) 

The poem exposes a journalistic eclecticism that offered accounts of hideous crime and fashion...