Before it is presented to the public, a text needs to be adorned by certain additions – ‘the paratext’ in Gerard Genette's terms (1997, 1) – which make it a proper book. These elements may be supplied by both the author and the publisher, and include the cover, front matter (including the title page and the contents), headings, footnotes and back matter. The paratext may have a profound influence on the reception and consumption of a book among readers, since this is what catches, or does not catch, their attention before they start reading the text proper. To use Genette's words, the paratext constitutes the book's ‘threshold of interpretation’ (ibid.), which may be a welcoming or an unwelcoming one. Philippe Lejeune, in turn, acknowledging their embellishing properties, characterizes these elements as ‘a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one's whole reading of the book’ (quoted in Genette 1997, 2).

In this chapter I argue that Blessington's paratexts reveal much about travel writing conventions and commercial practices in the first half of the nineteenth century. When examining the title pages of Blessington's four accounts of her travels, one notices that there are striking similarities between A Tour in the Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820 (1822) and Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris, in 1821 (1822), which distinguish them from The Idler in Italy (1839– 40) and The Idler in France (1841– 42). Therefore, I discuss the early and the mature texts separately throughout.

Neither of the two early journals identifies Marguerite Blessington as its author. The title page of A Tour in the Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820 includes the Latin phrase ‘CURRENTE CALAMO’, placed in the space commonly reserved for the name of the author. The phrase means ‘written off at once, without premeditation’, and it would have transmitted to the reader a twofold message. First, the identity of the author was not considered as vital as the fact that what followed was an immediate and thus authentic account of a journey. This would have been in accordance with the tendency in eighteenth- century travel writing to belittle the role of the writer and at the same time to attest to the text's veracity (Batten 1978, 39, 58).