Izaak Walton - Walton in literature

Writer, born in Stafford, Staffordshire, C England, UK. In 1621 he settled in London as an ironmonger, but left the city for Staffordshire during the Civil War, and after the Restoration lived in Winchester. Best known for his treatise on fishing and country life, The Compleat Angler (1653), he also wrote several biographies.

Izaak Walton (August 9, 1593 - December 15, 1683) was an English writer, author of The Compleat Angler.

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Walton was born at Stafford;

He settled in London as an ironmonger, and at first had one of the small shops, in the upper story of Gresham's Royal Burse or Exchange in Cornhill. He married again soon after, his second wife being Anne Ken — the pastoral Kenna of The Angler's Wish—step-sister of Thomas Ken, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells.

After the Royalist defeat at Marston Moor, Walton retired from business. In 1653 came out the first edition of his famous book, The Compleat Angler.

The last forty years of his long life seem to have been spent in ideal leisure and occupation, the old man traveling here and there, 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.

Walton hooked a much bigger fish than he angled for when he offered his quaint treatise, The Compleat Angler, to the public. The Compleat Angler was published in 1653, but Walton continued to add to its completeness in his leisurely way for a quarter of a century. In this last edition the thirteen chapters of the original have grown to twenty-one, 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 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; The famous passage about the frog—often misquoted about the worm

appears in the original edition. but in the second edition, as if in answer to an objection that "Piscator" had it too much in his own way in praise of angling, he introduced the falconer, "Auceps," changed "Viator" into "Venator" and made the new companions each dilate on the joys of his favourite sport.

Although The Compleat Angler was not Walton's first literary work, his leisurely labours 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, 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, left the task to him. 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. Sir Henry Wotton dying in 1639, Walton undertook his life also; 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.

The best-known old edition of the Angler is J Major's (2nd ed., 1824). See also Izaak Walton and his Friends, by S Martin (1903).

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

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. The Izaak Walton League is an American association of sportsmen that was formed in 1922 in Chicago, Illinois to preserve fishing streams.

Walton in literature

Walton has surfaced in recent American literature with his prominence in the best selling book by David James Duncan, The River Why (1983). In this semi-autobiographical novel, 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 is also the protagonist of Howard Waldrop's story God's Hooks!.

Walton is also 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."

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.

His anccestor Izaak Samuel Walton Lives in Atlanta, Ga.