Item 2 - A tour through Ireland: Wherein the present state of that kingdom is considered

xxiv, 373, [23] pp, plate, map; printed

Philip Luckombe, ‘A tour through Ireland: Wherein the present state of that kingdom is considered; and the most noted cities, towns, seats, buildings, loughs, &c. described. Interspersed with observations on the manners, customs, antiquities, curiosities, and natural history of that country. To which is prefixed, a general description of the Kingdom; with the distances between the ports, &c. on the coast of Great-Britain, and those on that of Ireland’ (London: 2nd edition, Printed for T. Lowndes and son, No 77, in Fleet-street, MDCCLXXXIII. [1783]).

The front is detached from the text block. Very careful manual handling of the volume is required.

Several manuscript annotations are extant on the opening pages of the volume. Many appear to be in the hand of Elizabeth Wood, presumably a former owner of the text. One of the annotations reads
‘3,500,000 people in Ireland in 1790
3/5 were catholicks
16,000 houses of which 1,300 sold spirituous liquor
112,000 inhabitants in Dublin’.
A printed stamp of Joseph S. Milligan, bookseller, Welton Mount, Leeds, is present on the inside of the front cover.

Born in Exeter in England, Philip Luckombe was a printer and later a travel writer. His ‘tour through Ireland’ was one of several Irish travel accounts published in the late eighteenth century and it appears that Luckombe simply lifted entire passages verbatim from previous works, most notably from Richard Twiss’s ‘A Tour in Ireland in 1775’ and Thomas Campbell’s ‘Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland’ (1777). Such was the extent of his plagiarism, some historians have questioned whether Luckombe ever visited Ireland at all. For additional information on Luckombe and his ‘Tour through Ireland’ see https://www.jstor.org/stable/30071022