The catalyst for this book was the conviction that Marguerite Blessington merited scholarly attention as a travel writer. In the introductory survey of the literature on Blessington, I indicated that even though the author herself has been revived in recent years, and her writing and editorial activity have become of interest to scholars, her travel texts have been largely neglected. The Idler in Italy and The Idler in France have been appreciated as sources of information on the writer's life; however, they have not yet been thoroughly discussed as literary texts. What is more, A Tour in the Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820 and Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris, in 1821 have been almost completely ignored. This book thus offered the first detailed analysis of Blessington's all four travel accounts, which represent the transitional period between the 1820s and the 1840s, reflecting both Romantic ideas and the pre- Victorian reality of England.

Ann R. Hawkins observes that ‘Blessington's problem in the complicated world of London society was to find a stance or a series of personae that would allow her a place to speak’ (Hawkins 2003a). Even though her travel accounts maintain the appearance of personal journalizing, clearly Blessington was composing them with her London readers in mind. In this book, I have claimed that travel experience and travel writing offered Blessington endless opportunities to reshape her public personae. In the writer's own words: ‘We are all influenced by the scene in which we find ourselves placed; and like the chameleon, whose body assumes the hue of whatever is near it, our minds borrow a colour from the objects that surround us’ (IiI 3: 174).

Such a self-reflexive and bold statement nevertheless would have been unthinkable on the threshold of her travel experiences. In the chapters making up Part I of this book, I indicated a clear demarcation line between A Tour in the Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820 and Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris, in 1821, on the one hand, and The Idler in Italy and The Idler in France, published almost 20 years later, on the other.