It Has Hooked Generations of Fishermen

By H. George Fletcher

In the spring, when melting snows and ice have released the freshet, and hibernating fish begin their immemorial annual cycle, the angler's thoughts turn to freshwater fishing in streams and ponds, rivers and estuaries. The historically and romantically minded among them think of their spiritual ancestor, Izaak Walton (1593-1683), and his immortal book.

In London 360 years ago this month, a small volume, illustrated with woodcuts of fish and several pages of jovial songs about the out-of-doors, went on sale in London at Richard Marriott's shop facing St. Dunstan's churchyard. It was easily carried about, especially in the capacious pockets of a gentleman's long-skirted coat of the era, and it sold well. Five editions, typically bound to order in plain brown calf, were required over the next 23 years, and more than 400 further editions have delighted readers since 1750.

Apart from a long slumber lasting from 1676 to 1750, Walton's "The Compleat Angler" has never stood still, either as book or as inspiration. It began as a relatively simple tale of two characters, meeting by chance very early on a fine May morning (meaning, one assumes, it wasn't actually raining) while walking out of London up Tottenham hill, and spending their time in the discussion and practice of the joys of fishing. It would expand to vast proportions: Additional characters would emerge in the early editions (it grew to 22 chapters from 15 in the two years between the first and second editions) and be joined by additional authors. Later editions would achieve heroic proportions in multivolume, heavily illustrated versions, some of them dressed out in piscatorial bindings of polychrome leathers and pictorial inlays.

This would have astounded Walton, an amiable and modest man of pious interests, for whom "Study to be quiet" (1 Thessalonians 4:11) was a favored motto. A royalist profoundly saddened by the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, he worked as an ironmonger in London near St. Dunstan's, the future parish of Ebenezer Scrooge. Walton's minister was John Donne, whom he attended in Donne's final illness and recalled with a biography. Married and widowed twice (only two of his 10 children outlived him), Walton was just shy of his 60th birthday when his book appeared, and he lived on for three more decades. His spelling was emblematic of his age, which was indifferent about such things. Isaac at birth and Isaac on his gravestone in Winchester Cathedral, he regularly signed himself simply Iz: Wa: in script and print. And of course our "Complete" was his "Compleat." When not emending his "Angler" and welcoming adjunct authors, he wrote short biographies, or Lives, of men important to church and state, and edited their prose and verse.

A resident of London, Worcester and Winchester for much of his life, Walton was born in Stafford to an alehouse keeper and maintained ties to his native Staffordshire. The 16th-century timber-framed thatched cottage that was his country home for his last three decades stands in excellent repair in Shallowford, a deeply rural, tiny hamlet aptly named for the fishing stream that runs through the property. It is open in the summertime.

The book's adjective would emerge as "Complete" in the 18th century, and its subtitle, "The Contemplative Man's Recreation," is indicative of Walton's nature. Angling, suitable even for parsons, for whom hunting was unseemly, had enjoyed a long tradition in England before Walton's day. His principal forerunner is the putative author of "A Treatise of Fishing With an Angle," published in 1486 in The Book of St. Albans. A Benedictine prioress of Sopwell, Dame Juliana Berners may be a myth, there being no evidence of her in surviving family accounts, and priory records are missing for the years she would have been there. In effect, Walton has the field, or rather the streams, to himself.

His book exudes inexorable charm, capturing the English countryside in its most profoundly preindustrial days. Walton quotes the bibliophile diplomat Henry Wotton:

"This day dame Nature seem'd in love:

The lustie sap began to move;

Fresh juice did stir th'imbracing Vines,

And birds had drawn their Valentines.

The jealous Trout, that low did lye,

Rose at a well dissembled flie;

There stood my friend with patient skill,

Attending of his trembling quil."

The perennial appeal of its literary and social aspects has delighted readers since its first appearance. Robert Floud, the brother of Walton's first wife, wrote of the "Angler":

"This Book is so like you, and you like it

For harmlesse Mirth, Expression, Art and Wit,

That I protest ingenuously, 'tis true,

I love this Mirth, Art, Wit, the Book and You."

In his love of angling for trout and other freshwater fish, Walton used a long rod of spliced ash and hazelwood, with a line of about the same length as the rod, made out of woven hair from a horse's tail. He also used natural bait, such as worms, flies and frogs. When in 1676 Robert Cotton, the younger man whom Walton treated as an adopted son, joined his own work to Walton's, creating "Walton and Cotton's Angler," he brought to the partnership the use of angling with dry flies. Cotton brought in the tying of flies, harking back to Dame Juliana and endorsing a craft that has enjoyed a long and challenging existence. Still, many of us prefer the Walton plain of 1653, before his advancing years brought with them garrulity and increasingly overt piety, even in his own later editions.

As the Anglo-American writer Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947) put it more than a century ago: "I imagine that the men to-day who really catch fish, as distinguished from the men who write sentimentally about angling, would as soon think of consulting Izaak Walton as they would Dame Juliana Berners. But anyone can catch fish—can he, do you say?—the thing is to have so written about catching them that your book is a pastoral, the freshness of which a hundred editions have left unexhausted,―a book in which the grass is for ever green, and the shining brooks do indeed go on for ever."

 

—Mr. Fletcher is a bibliophile and writer in New York.

A version of this article appeared May 25, 2013, on page C19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: It Has Hooked Generations of Fishermen.