For charm, elegance, and sheer ease of reading, few books compare with The Compleat Angler. Only a minority of its millions of readers since the mid-17th century—it has been reprinted more than any book in our language save the Authorized Edition of the Bible—are likely to have been fishing enthusiasts. One reaches for the dialogues of Piscator and Venator not in search of "More Directions how to Fish for, and how to make for the Trout an Artificial Minnow, and Flies," but because Izaak Walton is a delightful companion whose spirit imbues every page of his book, even those in the posthumous Part II, which was written by his friend Charles Cotton, the bawdy poet and translator of Corneille and Montaigne.
Walton is one of those extraordinary amateurs who flourished in that period after English literature ceased to be merely an aristocratic pastime but before it established itself as a profession. He was born in 1594 in Stafford, the son of an innkeeper who died when he was three years old. We know little of his early life, save that his mother remarried. By 1614 he was in London, where he worked as a linen draper and kept a shop in Fleet Street. He served as warden of St. Dunstan’s parish church, where he befriended the vicar, John Donne, of whom he later wrote a wonderful biography. He was married in 1626 to Rachel Floud. Each of their seven children predeceased him. Walton married again after Floud’s death in 1640, only to find himself a widower once more at the age of 68. After losing his second wife Anne, he wrote his life of Richard Hooker, which contains one of the most remarkable final scenes in our language:
Dr. Saravia [a companion] visited Hooker on his death-bed, and found him deep in contemplation, and not inclinable to discourse; which gave the doctor occasion to inquire his present thoughts; to which he replied, "That he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which peace could not be in heaven; and oh that it might be so on earth."
Aside from this series of bereavements and the composition of his famous treatise, which continued intermittently for decades after the appearance of the first edition in 1654, the most significant occurrence in the life of Walton came in 1651, when he carried a badge belonging to the exiled Charles II out of Stafford to a royalist colonel imprisoned in the Tower of London. Otherwise, like those of many great authors, his life was on the whole supremely, almost pathetically uneventful in the best English spirit. The crown and the Church of England were, along with domestic life and sport, the dominant institutions in his life. His favorite fishing partners were all clergymen. By the time of his death in 1683, he could say without exaggeration that he had spent more than two decades of his earthly allotment idling beside the banks of rivers and ponds.
Unlike that of Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, and so many other contemporaries, Walton’s prose rarely shines in extracts. The most quotable passages are humble apothegms, many of which—"No man can lose what he never had"; "Health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of,—a blessing that money cannot buy"—survive to this day in mutilated versions on Hallmark cards. To enjoy him, it is necessary to accept that there will be no purple passages. After only a few pages, the serene back-and-forth between an expert fisherman and his pupil becomes as enchanting as one of Shakespeare’s early comedies.
The beautiful block print of a trout adorning its cover and the decorative maps reproduced from a late 19th-century printing are most attractive features of the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Compleat Angler. There is almost nothing else to recommend it, certainly not the tiresome introduction by Marjorie Swann. These 18 pages—sample heading: "The Compleat Angler and the Environment"— bored me when I did not find them baffling. Here, for instance, is Swann writing about a Victorian comic adaptation of Walton in which a female love interest was added: "The nineteenth-century English poet playwright Charles Dance apparently found the gender dynamics of The Compleat Angler unsatisfactory, and he accordingly revised the plot of Walton’s book." The most charitable interpretation of this passage is that it is Swann’s supremely odd way of noting that the wooing of women has been a hallmark of pastoral comedy from Theocritus all the way down to Right Ho, Jeeves. You can’t have a boy-loves-girl story without a girl.
I suppose the principals at Oxford University Press think a new edition of a book like this would be a tough sell without fresh prefatory material. I am not so sure this is the case. For decades every book in the World’s Classics line has noted opposite the title page that in their early years these books "contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading." Why should these introductions, and other equally charming ones from lesser-known figures, not continue to appear? At the very least, commissioning editors might try harder in their searches. It would be not be difficult to locate new voices more edifying than that of the wife of the president of Hendrix College.
There are hundreds of thousands of copies of The Compleat Angler collecting dust in second-hand bookshops the world round. There really isn’t a reason to purchase this one.