Mary Shelley's Rambles both resembles and attempts to separate itself from other travel narratives of the time. Elizabeth Nitchie, in her description of the text, writes, for example, that there is "little novelty either in what [Shelley] saw or in her account" of the Alps, the Rhine, or Italy,[48] and Moskal notes that Shelley's "book participates in the travel-book convention of museum-going".[49] Although Shelley drew on Murray's famous handbooks and other guidebooks, she specifically attempted to differentiate her work from these. While Murray's guidebooks, for example, were generally apolitical, Shelley argues in the preface to Rambles that the uniqueness of her work is in its portrayal of the Italian people from "a political point of view".[50] Shelley had sold her publisher on the idea of a travel narrative by describing the forthcoming book as "light" and "amusing", in the style of Samuel Rogers, whose travel narrative of Italy, accompanied by illustrations by J. M. W. Turner, had been a best-seller in the late 1820s.