In 1859, the educational publication, The R. I. Schoolmaster, introduced Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, in terms by which he is still popularly imagined today:
'Few men’s lives present so perfect a picture of quiet contentment, as does Izaak Walton’s. Living during the stormiest, and the gayest periods of modern times in England he yet allowed his serene mind neither to be ruffled by commotion, nor to be intoxicated with pleasure.'
It is certainly true that Walton’s long life coincided with some of England’s most tumultuous years, from the Civil Wars of the 1640s and 50s to the restoration of Charles II. Walton was born in Stafford in 1593 in the reign of Elizabeth I and died ninety years later, near the end of Charles II’s premiership.
At some point in his teenage years he relocated to London, starting work as a linen draper. He maintained this urban and mercantile existence until 1644 when, after the Royalist’s rout at the Battle of Marston Moor, he moved to Shallowford in the county of his upbringing, Staffordshire. It was here, in 1653, that he wrote the first edition of his classic work, The Compleat Angler.
Ostensibly a practical manual on fishing, this book dedicated chapters to different fish and the techniques necessary for catching them.
Walton was a staunch Royalist, not totally aligned to his Victorian reimagining as a man who turned his back to the world in the pursuit of pastoral tranquillity. Indeed, he ran considerable risks for his cause. In the aftermath of the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Walton acted as a courier, transporting some of the crown jewels to London for shipment to the exiled Charles II. He returned to his home county of Staffordshire in later life as part of a wider cultural shift whereby Anglican clergy and Royalist gentlemen sought solace in the countryside, away from the Puritanical commercial centres of southern and eastern England. Therefore, the credence Walton gave to quiet country recreation was a direct response to the political situation in England and not, as some would claim, a wilful neglection of it.
The afterlife of Walton’s 'The Compleat Angler' began immediately following its initial publication in 1653. Walton kept adding to the ever-expanding volume, so that by 1676 it was in its fifth edition and had grown from thirteen to twenty-one chapters. Barely out of print since its initial release, it is one of the most published English language works after Shakespeare and the Bible. This book’s scholarly relevance lies in its oblique addressing of contemporary tumult through inventive narrative devices and as a formative expression of the pastoral in the English canon. That it has enjoyed such lasting popularity must, however, result from the work’s gentle philosophy and the applicability to our own lives of Walton’s passion for and solace in fishing as an antidote to a troubled world.