Robin Hood
Children's books on the subject of Robin Hood are common in the first
two decades of the nineteenth century in England, and songs from Leonard
MacNally's comic opera, dating from 1784, were likewise current. But
the outlaw of Sherwood Forest, with his libertarian and populist associations,
also retains a political connotation for Mary Shelley's culture,
particularly in the representation of the eccentric antiquarian Joseph Ritson
(1752-1803), whose Robin Hood; a collection of all the ancient poems,
songs, and ballads now extant, relative to that celebrated English
outlaw: to which are prefixed, historical anecdotes of his life was
first published in 1795.
