[1] Travers gives Poppins the accent and vocabulary of a real London nanny: cockney base notes overlaid with a strangled gentility.

[3] Acclaimed for her performance as Poppins in the 2018 sequel, Emily Blunt received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical.

Eventually they based Mary Poppins' appearance on that of a Dutch doll: tall and bony, with short black hair, large blue eyes, a snub nose, and a prim, pursed mouth.

"[5] Mary Poppins in Travers' books is strict and no-nonsense, asserting her unusual brand of discipline over the four (later five) Banks children in her charge.

Some characters, most notably an impudent jackdaw seen in the first two books, call her "The Great Exception", meaning, among other things, that she is the only human being who has retained the magical secrets infants possess (such as the power to communicate with animals) until they grow up and forget about them.

In the first book, Poppins arrives at Number Seventeen Cherry Tree Lane, London, home of the Banks family, with her travelling carpet bag, having been blown in by the east wind.

Mary Poppins in the Disney film, as portrayed by Julie Andrews, is also fairly stern but at the same time more gentle, cheerful, and nurturing of the two Banks children, of whom she is in charge.

She also is less vain and selfish (although there are a couple of references to her vanity when she replaces a dingy wall mirror with a more elegant one and sings a duet with her reflection), and far more sympathetic towards the two children than the nanny in the original stories.

[10] Mary Poppins appears in Alan Moore's third League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel, Black Dossier, when it returns to Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World.

In a sequence celebrating British children's literature during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, a group of over thirty Mary Poppinses with umbrellas descended en masse to fight and defeat the nightmares (the villains Queen of Hearts, Captain Hook, Cruella de Vil, and Lord Voldemort) haunting children's dreams.

[12] Terry Pratchett's Susan Sto Helit character parodies Mary Poppins in various ways, most explicitly in the novel Hogfather.

In Family Guy season 6 episode "Padre de Familia", in a cutaway gag Peter dressed up as Mary Poppins he arrives to take care to Michael and Jane but only ends up killing them.