Richard Pococke (1704-65), archdeacon of Dublin, and later bishop of Meath, was an obsessive traveller whose journeys into Egypt and the remoter Alps earned him a European reputation. His extensive travels through Ireland from the 1740s to the 1760s included a circuit of the Irish coastline in 1752 and a journey through west Cork and Kerry in 1758. These were more explorations than tours, and they included excursions to many of the offshore islands then almost completely unvisited by English or other travellers. Pococke kept a detailed written record of all his travels. His Irish journals, never before collected, are here published complete for the first time. They offer a fascinating insight into the life of mid-eighteenth century Ireland.

In Richard Pococke’s Letters from the East (1737-1740), Rachel Finnegan provides edited transcripts of the full run of correspondence from Richard Pococke’s famous eastern voyage from 1737-41. In this new volume, Finnegan combines updated biographical accounts of the traveller and his correspondents (his mother, Elizabeth Pococke and his uncle and patron, Bishop Thomas Milles) from vol. 1 of the original edition of Letters from Abroad (2011) with transcriptions of the letters from vol. 3 of the series (2013), together with new material that has hitherto been unpublished. Thus, in a single volume, she sets the context of the life and times of the traveller and his family against the background of this voluminous corpus of fascinating correspondence, which can be read in conjunction with Pococke’s own published account of his travels, A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1743-45).

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

Based on the accounts of British and Anglo-Irish travelers, 'Creating Irish Tourism' charts the development of tourism in Ireland from its origins in the mid-eighteenth century to the country's emergence as a major European tourist destination a century later. The work shows how the Irish tourist experience evolved out of the interactions among travel writers, landlords, and visitors with the peasants who, as guides, jarvies, venders, porters and beggars, were as much a part of Irish tourism as the scenery itself.