ABSTRACT
In her journal entry for 26 September 1814 in Bristol, Millicent Bant describes reading poetry to her employer, Lady Jane Wilson:
I recited to her Ladyship the following verses by that gloomy misanthropist Cowper which meeting with her approbation induces me here to give it a place. Supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk who was left for several years on an uninhabited Island upon which circumstances Defoe built his celebrated and much read novel of Robinson Crusoe. [Then Bant goes on to add the poem] I am monarch of all I survey My right there is none to dispute From the centre all around to the Sea I am lord of the Fowl and the Brute. 1
