Julia Moore’s poetry was so bad that it gained a national following even among her contemporaries in the 1870s. One reviewer wrote, “Shakespeare, could he read it, would be glad that he was dead”:

They once did live at Edgerton,
They once did live at Muskegon,
From there they went to Chicago,
Which proved their fatal overthrow.

It was William House’s family,
As fine a family as you see—
His family was eleven in all,
I do not think it was very small.

She stopped writing when she saw that her fans were laughing, not weeping — and, immortally, she closed her career with these lines:

And now kind friends, what I have wrote
I hope you will pass o’er,
And not criticise as some have done
Hitherto herebefore.