Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Two friends walk out to a river on a fine morning to fish and talk. That is nearly the whole plot, and it is enough. Izaak Walton teaches how to catch fish, yes, but mostly he teaches how to enjoy a quiet day: songs, green fields, good food, and unhurried friendship. People have loved this gentle book for almost four hundred years because peace is always worth learning.
Izaak Walton was a London ironmonger and cloth trader who retired to the country and to friendship, fishing, and writing the lives of poets and churchmen, including his friend John Donne. He published The Compleat Angler in 1653, during the Commonwealth after the civil wars, and revised and enlarged it through several editions. A second part by his younger friend Charles Cotton was added later, completing the book as most readers know it.
The work is cast as a conversation on a May walk toward the river, between Piscator the angler, Venator the hunter, and Auceps the falconer, with the angler winning the argument for his art. Between dialogues come practical teaching on rods, lines, baits, and the catching of trout, chub, and many other fish, seasoned with songs, verses, a milkmaid's invitation, and recipes, including how to dress a chub so it might be eaten.
Few books have been reprinted so often in English, and anglers have carried it for four centuries less as a manual than as a companion. Its subject is contentment: friendship, places, and unhurried attention in a troubled age. Gentle readers of any kind, fishers or not, will find its peace genuine and earned.
Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler in 1653, in the weary years after England's civil war, and it has never been out of print for long since. Part fishing manual, part dialogue between friends walking to the river, part celebration of milkmaids, songs, and quiet contentment, it teaches how to catch fish and how to live gently. It offers the most peaceful book in English literature.
The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653, may be the most reprinted book on any sport in English, and it is barely, at bottom, about catching fish. Izaak Walton, a retired London tradesman writing in the exhausted aftermath of civil war, framed his manual as a walk and a conversation: Piscator the fisherman instructs a hunter and a falconer, and, between lessons on baits and each species of fish, the party sings, dines at an inn, hears a milkmaid sing, and praises the contemplative life over the ambitions that had just torn England apart so bloodily.
The book has lasted because Walton fused instruction with a philosophy of enough. The fishing is real and still instructive, but the peace is the product, and generation after generation of readers, anglers and otherwise, have bought the book for the peace. First readers should know that Charles Cotton's second part, added in later editions, continues the dialogue on fly fishing. Read the 1653 core slowly, preferably in spring. No English book better teaches the difference between killing time outdoors and spending it well in good company.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 683.
The first chapter
To the Right worshipful
John Offley
of Madeley Manor, in the County of Stafford
Esquire, My most honoured Friend
Sir,--I have made so ill use of your former favours, as by them to be encouraged to entreat, that they may be enlarged to the patronage and protection of this Book: and I have put on a modest confidence, that I shall not be denied, because it is a discourse of Fish and Fishing, which you know so well, and both love and practice so much.
You are assured, though there be ignorant men of another belief, that Angling is an Art: and you know that Art better than others; and that this is truth is demonstrated by the fruits of that pleasant labour which you enjoy, when you purpose to give rest to your mind, and divest yourself of your more serious business, and, which is often, dedicate a day or two to this recreation.
At which time, if common Anglers should attend you, and be eyewitnesses of the success, not of your fortune, but your skill, it would doubtless beget in them an emulation to be like you, and that emulation might beget an industrious diligence to be so; but I know it is not attainable by common capacities: and there be now many men of great wisdom, learning, and experience, which love and practice this Art, that know I speak the truth.
Sir, this pleasant curiosity of Fish and Fishing, of which you are so great a master, has been thought worthy the pens and practices of divers in other nations, that have been reputed men of great learning and wisdom. And amongst those of this nation, I remember Sir Henry Wotton, a dear lover of this Art, has told me, that his intentions were to write a Discourse of the Art, and in praise of Angling; and doubtless he had done so, if death had not prevented him; the remembrance of which had often made me sorry, for if he had lived to do it, then the unlearned Angler had seen some better treatise of this Art, a treatise that might have proved worthy his perusal, which, though some have undertaken, I could never yet see in English.
But mine may be thought as weak, and as unworthy of common view; and I do here freely confess, that I should rather excuse myself, than censure others, my own discourse being liable to so many exceptions; against which you, Sir, might make this one, that it can contribute nothing to YOUR knowledge. And lest a longer epistle may diminish your pleasure, I shall make this no longer than to add this following truth, that I am really,
Sir,
your most affectionate Friend,
and most humble Servant,
Iz. Wa.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1653. Author died 1683. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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