Izaak Walton

Izaak Walton (August 9, 1593 - December 15, 1683) was an English biographer, who is best known for The Compleat Angler, a classic guide to the joys of fishing with over 300 new printings. It combines practical information about angling with fishing folklore. Born in Stafford, Walton moved to London, where he ran an ironmonger's shop. After the defeat of the Royalists, Walton retired and spent the final 40 years fishing and conversing with eminent clergymen.

Despite his modest education, Walton read widely and associated with writers and scholars. Until 1643, he lived in the parish of St. Dunstan, where John Donne was a vicar, and the two become friends. When Sir Henry Wotton, a poet and provost of Eton, died, Walton continued Wotton's biography of Donne. Walton also wrote other biographical works about such persons as the poet and Walton's fishing companion, George Herbert; Robert Sanderson, bishop of Lincoln; Wotton; and theologian Richard Hooker.

Today, associations such the Izaak Walton League draw upon Walton's glimpses of an idyllic and now-lost rural life to promote the preservation of fishing streams.

Biography

Walton was born at Stafford, England. His father, who was an innkeeper, died before Izaak was three. His mother then married another innkeeper. Walton probably had some schooling in Stafford, but when he moved to London he was apprenticed to a cloth merchant and did not continue his education.

In the 1610s, he was a proprietor of an ironmonger's shop. In 1618, he became a freeman of the Ironmonger's Company, eventually making himself prosperous through his own drapery business. In 1626, Walton married Rachel Floud. She was a relative of Archbishop Cranmer and Walton started to move in clerical circles. The couple had seven children, who all died young. Rachel herself died in 1640.

During the English Civil War, Walton supported Charles II against the Puritan revolt under Oliver Cromwell. After the Royalist defeat at Marston Moor, Walton retired, about 1644. "I have laid aside business, and gone afishing," he wrote in The Compleat Angler. His second marriage was with Ann Ken in 1646. Walton had bought some land near his birthplace in Stafford, and he went to live there. However, in 1650 he was again living in Clerkenwell. The first edition of his famous book, The Compleat Angler was published in 1653.

After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the death of his second wife in 1662, Walton lived at Farnham Castle as permanent guest of George Morley, the bishop of Winchester. Walton died in Winchester on December 15, 1683. He was buried in the Winchester Cathedral, where today there is a glass painting which portrays him reading a book and fishing.

Fishing

The last 40 years of his Walton's long life seem to have been spent in ideal leisure and occupation, visiting eminent clergymen and others who enjoyed fishing, compiling the biographies of congenial spirits, and collecting here a little and there a little for the enlargement of his famous treatise. After 1662, he found a home at Farnham Castle with George Morley, bishop of Winchester, to whom he dedicated his Life of George Herbert and also that of Richard Hooker. From time to time he visited Charles Cotton in his fishing house on the Dove River. In 1683, he died in his daughter's house at Winchester, and was buried in the cathedral. It is characteristic of his kindly nature that he left his property at Shallowford for the benefit of the poor of his native town.

Walton's masterwork

The Compleat Angler was published in 1653, but Walton continued to add to it for a quarter of a century. Dedicated to John Offley, his most honored friend, it was the story of three friends, traveling through the English countryside, is enlivened by occasional songs, ballads, quotations from several writers, and glimpses of an idyllic and now lost rural life.

"Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, " Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did "; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling." (from The Compleat Angler)

The Compleat Angler was a combination of manual and meditation. "Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt." (The Compleat Angler) The work became one of the most reprinted books in the history of British letters. The story is of three sportsmen: a fisherman (Piscator, who is Walton himself), a huntsman (Venator), and a fowler (Auceps). They travel along the river Lea on the first day in May and discuss the relative merits of their favorite pastimes. Auceps tells how "the very birds of the air, those that be not Hawks, are both so many and so useful and pleasant to mankind, that I must not let them pass without some observations. They both feed and refresh him; feed him with their choice bodies, and refresh him with their heavenly voices."

In his own turn, Venator defends hunting: "Hunting trains up the younger nobility to the use of manly exercises in their riper age. What more manly exercise than hunting the Wild Boar, the Stag, the Buck, the Fox, or the Hare? How doth it preserve health, and increase strength and activity!" And finally Piscator reminds his friends: "I might tell you that Almighty God is said to have spoken to a fish, but never to a beast; that he hath made a whale a ship, to carry and set his prophet, Jonah, safe on the appointed shore."

Walton drew his work on Nicholas Breton's (c. 1545-1626) fishing idyll Wits Trenchmour (1597). The second edition was largely rewritten, and in the fifth edition Walton wrote about fly-fishing on the river Dove, a subject the author, himself, knew little about. The last edition was published in 1676, and included additional material by Charles Cotton (Instructions how to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream) and Colonel Robert Venables's The Experienced Angler, or Angling Improved. Walton called this work, The Universal Angler. He had taught Cotton, but never met Venables.

Walton did not profess to be an expert with the fly; the fly fishing in his first edition was contributed by Thomas Barker, a retired cook and humorist, who produced a treatise of his own in 1659; but in the use of the live worm, the grasshopper, and the frog "Piscator" himself could speak as a master. The famous passage about the frog—often misquoted about the worm

"use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer"

There was a second edition of The Compleat Angler in 1655, a third in 1661 (identical with that of 1664), a fourth in 1668, and a fifth in 1676. In this last edition, the 13 chapters of the original have grown to 21, and a second part was added by his loving friend and brother angler, Charles Cotton, who took up Venator where Walton had left him and completed his instruction in fly-fishing and the making of flies.

Walton the biographer

Although The Compleat Angler was not Walton's first literary work, his leisurely labors as a biographer seem to have grown out of his devotion to angling. It was probably as an angler that he made the acquaintance of Sir Henry Wotton, a poet and provost of Eton, but it is clear that Walton had more than a love of fishing and a humorous temper to recommend him to the friendship of the accomplished ambassador. At any rate, Wotton, who had intended to write the life of John Donne, and had already corresponded with Walton on the subject. Walton had already contributed an Elegy to the 1633 edition of Donne’s poems, and he completed and published the life, much to the satisfaction of the most learned critics, in 1640.

When Wotton died in 1639, Walton also undertook a biography on his life. It was finished in 1642, and published in 1651. His life of theologian Richard Hooker was published in 1662, that of poet George Herbert in 1670, and that of Bishop Robert Sanderson of Lincoln in 1678. All these subjects were endeared to the biographer by a certain gentleness of disposition and cheerful piety; three of them at least—Donne, Wotton, and Herbert—were anglers. Their lives were evidently written. with loving pains, in the same leisurely fashion as his Angler, and like it are of value less as exact knowledge than as harmonious and complete pictures of character.

Walton also rendered affectionate service to the memory of his friends Sir John Skeffington and John Chalkhill, editing with prefatory notices Skeffington's Hero of Lorenzo in 1652 and Chalkhill's Thealma and Clearchus a few months before his own death in 1683. His poems and prose fragments were collected in 1878 under the title of Waltoniana.

Legacy

The best-known old edition of the Angler is J. Major's (2nd ed., 1824). The book was edited by Andrew Lang in 1896, and various modern editions have appeared. The standard biography is that by Sir Harris Nicolas, prefixed to an edition of the Angler (1836). There are notices also, with additional scraps of fact, annexed to two American editions, Bethune's (1847) and Dowling's (1857). An edition of Walton's Lives, by G. Sampson, appeared in 1903. See also Izaak Walton and his Friends, by S. Martin (1903).

At least two organizations have been inspired by and named after Izaak Walton. Inspired by The Compleat Angler, advertising mogul and land developer Barron Collier founded the Izaak Walton Fishing Club in 1908 at his Useppa Island resort near Fort Myers, Florida. It was considered one of the most exclusive sporting clubs in the world. The Izaak Walton League is an American association of sportsmen that was formed in 1922 in Chicago, Illinois to preserve fishing streams.

The Izaak Walton Hotel stands, appropriately, on the Staffordshire bank of the Dove River, at the southern end of Dovedale.

Walton in literature

Walton has appeared in several works of literature:

• Charles Dickens uses the name Izaak Walton in A Tale of Two Cities to develop an extended metaphor comparing Jerry Cruncher's night-time "occupation" of grave robbing to fishing.

• Washington Irving's humorous essay "The Angler" comments on Walton's popularity; the work can be found in "The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon" available via Project Gutenberg.

• Walton is mentioned in Jules Verne's classic The Mysterious Island when the castaways decide to use snares to catch birds: "He took Herbert to some distance from the nests, and there prepared his singular apparatus with all the care which a disciple of Izaak Walton would have used."

• Walton is the protagonist of Howard Waldrop's short story God's Hooks! (1982).

• In the best selling semi-autobiographical novel The River Why (1983) by David James Duncan, The Compleat Angler serves as the most revered book in the irreverent flyfisherman Gus Orviston's childhood home, his parents quoting and misquoting the treatise to obsessively argue their respective sides of the artificial fly lure versus natural bait controversy.

• Walton appears as "Piscator" in the novel "Silverlock" by John Myers Myers.

• Walton comes under fire in Norman Maclean's short story A River Runs Through It, later filmed under the same name.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Pool, J. Lawrence, & Pool, Angeline J. Isaak: The Comleat Angler and His Turbulent Times, Stinehour Press, 1976. ASIN B000KIVHFY
• Walton, Izaak. The Compleat Angler, Hard Press, 2006. ISBN 978-1406943533
• Walton, Izaak, & Martin, Jessica. Izaak Walton: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press, 1997. ISBN 978-1857543070
• Wood, Arnold. A Bibliography of the Complete Angler of Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, Martino Publishing, 2002. ISBN 978-1578983070

External links

• Works by Izaak Walton. Project Gutenberg

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