Career
He was an Irish author and clergyman who wanted to study and improve the condition of the poor. Cooke had been an officer in the Irish Volunteers militia. He worked as a parish clergyman for seventeen years before becoming assistant chaplain at the Magdalen Asylum in Dublin.
He is best remembered as a writer of Irish tales.
His writings, which display humour and sympathy with the poorer classes in Ireland, include Sketches in Ireland (1827), Sketches in Erris and Tyrawley and A Tour in Connaught (1839). He died on 16 March 1842 in Dublin at the age of sixty-three.
