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Izaak Walton (1593-1683) |
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Izaak Walton was an English biographer, best known for The Compleat Angler (1653), a classic guide to the joys of fishing. One of the most reproduced books in the English language, it combines practical information about angling with folklore. 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 by Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, edited with an introduction by Richard Le Gallienne, illustrated by Edmund H. New, London: John Lane, MDCCCXCVII, p. 125; first published in 1653 in London); Izaak Walton was born in the town of Stafford, in the West Midlands. Walton was baptised at St. Mary's Church. His father, Gervase Walton of Yoxall, who was a tippler, "a person who kept an alehouse but did not serve meals or rent rooms." (Izaak Walton by P. G. Stanford, New York: Twayne, 1998, p. 1) He died before Izaak was three. His mother, Anne, then married another innkeeper. Walton had probably some schooling in Stafford – he had some knowledge of Latin. About the age of twenty, he moved to London where he lived with his sister Anne. He was apprenticed to Thomas Grinsell, probably a draper, the husband of his sister. Grisell was a member of the Ironmongers' Company. In the 1610s Walton was a proprietor of an ironmonger's shop. His shop was in Fleet Street and his house in Chancery Lane. Walton became in 1618 a freeman of the
Ironmongers' Company, eventually making himself prosperous through his
own drapery business. Saying goodbye to his bachelor years in December 1626, Walton married Rachel Floud; they had
seven children who all died young. Rachel was a
relative of Archbishop Cranmer and Walton started to move in clerical
circles. About the time when Rachel
died, in 1640, Walton left London. His second marriage was with Anne
Ken in 1646; two of their children survived. Anne died in 1662. She was the eldest daughter of Thomas Ken, attorney-at-law. 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 so friends
that he attended the poet at his deathbed in 1631. Walton wrote:
". . . and in the last hour of his last day, as his body melted away,
and vapoured into spirit, his soul having, I verily believe, some
revelation of the beatifical vision, he said, "I were miserable if I
might not die;" and after those words, closed many periods of his faint
breath by saying often, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." His
speech, which had long been his ready and faithful servant, left him
not till the last minute of his life". (The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr, Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson, by Izaak Walton, with some account of the author and his writings by Thomas Zouch, New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846,p. 113) 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 and Death of Dr Donne, written in 1640. Walton also wrote other biographical works about such
persons as the poet and Walton's fishing companion George Herbert, Robert Sanderson, bishop of
Lincoln, Henry Wotton, and theologian Richard Hooker. Samuel Johnson regarded Walton's
Lives as one of his favorite books. Walton left London for Staffordshire during the Civil War. He was a
staunch royalist and did not feel safe under the reign of Cromwell. After the
battle of Worcester 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, in the
house of Dr William Hawkins. His cottage Walton left in his will to the
"Towne or Corporation of Stafford (in which I was borne) for the good
and benefit of some of the said towne". (Ancient, Curious, and Famous Wills by Virgil M. Harris, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911, p. 318) Walton was
buried in the soutth aisle of Winchester Cathedral, in Prior Silkstede's Chapel. There is a glass painting, which portrays him
reading a book and fishing. The Compleat Angler was a combination of manual and
meditation in the Stoic style of Marcus Aurelius. ". . . yet the whole
Discourse is, or rather was, a picture of my own
disposition, especially in such days and times as I have laid aside
business, and gone a-fishing with honest Nat. and R. Roe . . . " (Ibid., p. 8) 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 28 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 the earth feeds man, and all
those several beasts that both feed him and afford him recreation. What
pleasure doth man take in hunting the stately stag, the generous buck,
the wild boar, the cunning otter, the crafty fox, and the fearful
hare?" (Ibid., p. 33) And
finally Piscator reminds his friends: "I might both enlarge and lose
myself in such-like arguments; 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." (Ibid., p. 39) 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. It was a subject the author himself knew little about and he turned to Thomas Barker for the fly fishing section. Barker, had produced a treatise, Barker's Delight: or, The Art of Angling, in 1657. The last edition, published in 1676, 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. Lord Byron, a vegetarian, was so disgusted by Walton's treatment of animals, that he wrote in Don Juan
(Canto XIII): "And angling, too, that solitary vice, / Whatever Izaak
Walton sings or says; / The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet /
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it." (Lord Byron's Don Juan, with Life and Notes by A. C. Cunningham, Philadelphia: Jas. B. Smith, 1859, p. 343) John Buchan, who edited Methuen's edition of The Compleat Angler
from 1901, wrote that the work "remains a model of ease and charm. At
its worst it is monotonous, the sentence falling away into
shapelessness and a flat and ugly close." (The Compleat Angler: Or, The Contemplative Man's Recreation, Introduction and Notes by John Buchan, Methuen & Company, 1901, p. xxxi) For further reading: The Making of Walton's Lives by David Novarr (1958); Biography in the Hands of Walton, Johnson and Boswell by John Butt (1966); The Art of the Compleat Angler by John R. Cooper (1968); Lives of English Laymen by William H. Teale (1977); Izaak Walton to Henry Fielding: The Critical Perspective, edited 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); 'Walton, Izaak,' in Encyclopedia of British Writers: 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries, edited by Alan Hager (2005); 'Introduction' by Marjorie Swann, in The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton & Charles Cotton (2014); Environment, Society, and The Compleat Angler by Marjorie Swann (2023) - "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. " ('To Master Isaak Walton,' in Letters To Dead Authors by Andrew Lang, 1886, p, 86) Selected works:
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