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 English
biographer, who is best known for THE COMPLEAT ANGLER (1653), a
classic guide to the joys of fishing with over 300 new printings.
In combines practical information about angling with folklore. The
story of three friends, travelling through the English countryside,
is enlivened by occasional songs, ballads, quotations from authors,
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, 1653-1655)
Izaak Walton was born in Stafford. His father, who was an innkeeper,
died before Izaak was three. His mother then married another innkeeper.
Walton had probably some schooling in Stafford, but he moved to
London where he was apprenticed to a cloth merchant. In the 1610s
he was the proprietor of an ironmonger's shop in Fleet Street and
lived in a house in Chancery Lane. 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; they
had seven children who all died young. Racher died in 1640. She
was a relative of Archbishop Cranmer and Walton began to move in
clerical circles. His second marriage was with Ann Ken in 1646.
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 (1568-1639) died - he was a poet and Provost
of Eton - Walton continued Wotton's biography of Donne. It appeared
as a preface to a volume of Donne's sermons, enlarged later, and
was published separately in 1658. Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent
Occasions and Death's Duel, written originally in 1624, was
published later with Walton's THE LIFE OF DR. JOHN DONNE, in 1640.
Walton also wrote other biographical works including the poet and
Walton's fishing companion George Herbert, Robert Sanderson, bishop
of Lincoln, Henry Wotton, and theologian Richard Hooker.
"I have laid aside business, and gone afishing."
(from The Compleat Angler)
 Walton
left London for Staffordshire during the Civil War. He was a royalist
during the reign of Cromwell. After the battle of Worchester in
1651 he is mentioned among the supporters of Charles II. He seems
to have retired from business about 1644. After the Restoration
(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 Cathedral. There is a glass painting, which portrays
him as he reads a book and angles.
The Compleat Angler is a combination of manual and meditations.
It became one of the most reprinted books in the history of British
letters. The story concerns 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 favourite pastimes. Auceps admits that
"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." 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 from Nicholas Breton's (c. 1545-1626) fishing
idyll Wits Trenchmour (1597). The second edition was largely
rewritten and in the fifth edition Walton included a section concerning
fly-fishing on the river Dove, a subject the author himself knew
little about. The last edition was published in 1676 and includes
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.
 "Angling
may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be
fully learnt."
(The Compleat Angler)
For further reading: The Making of Waalton's Lives by
D.Novarr (1958); Biography in the Hands of Walton, Johnson and
Boswell by J.E. Butt (1966); The Art of the Compleat Angler by
J.R. Cooper (1968); Lives of English Laymen by William H. Teale
(1977); Izaak Walton to Henry Fielding: The Critical Perspective,
ed. by Harold Bloom (1987); Izaak Walton by P.G. Stanwood (1998);
The Complete Angler: A Connecticut Yankee Follows in the Footsteps
of Walton by James Prosek (1999) - "Father Isaac,--When I would
be quiet and go angling it is my custom to carry in my wallet
thy pretty book, "The Compleat Angler." Here, methinks, if I find
not trout I shall find content, and good company, and sweet songs,
fair milkmaids, and country mirth. For you are to know that trout
be now scarce and whereas he was ever a fearful fish, he hath
of late become so wary that none but the cunningest anglers may
be even with him. " ('Letter --To Master Isaak Walton' in
Letters To Dead Authors by Andrew Lang, 1886)
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