In her study of women travel writers and the language of aesthetics, Elizabeth Bohls points out that at the turn of the eighteenth century the search for a perfect view became the priority of British travellers to the Continent. She notes that in order to develop proper taste in landscaping, one needed to have ‘a high degree of literacy, an acquaintance with writings on aesthetics and works of literature; access to paintings, or at least engravings; and the mobility to examine and compare different views’ (Bohls 1995, 66). As the titles of her two most extensive travel accounts, The Idler in Italy and The Idler in France, suggest, Blessington wished to be perceived as a scenic traveller enjoying the luxury of leisure time, which enabled her to appreciate the scenery of the foreign countries. Though she refrained from admitting it openly in the preface to the journal, she had the same aim when on her home tour of the Isle of Wight.

The scenic tour was not only a travel practice but also a genre of writing (see Bohls 1995, 66). Thus, when travel writers found scenery they had searched for, they would attempt to paint it with their words. However, as Chloe Chard observes, they tended to admit that words fail to translate to the reader ‘the dramatic intensity’ of what the eye experienced (Chard 1999, 84). Accordingly, when Blessington records the moment in which she pauses to contemplate the view, she frequently doubts her ability ‘to do justice to it by description’ (IoW 56). On such occasions she is tempted to draw analogies between the arts of painting and writing. Once she helplessly exclaims: ‘What a picture is now spread before me, and how poor, how colourless are words to paint it!’ (IiI 2: 193). Later on she continues this train of thought:

Each time, however, despite the claimed inability, the writer makes an attempt to illustrate the scene.