Walton, ISAAC, the 'Father of Angling,' was born at Stafford, 9th August 1593. Of his early years we know nothing save that his father died early; but in 1624 we find him settled in Fleet Street, near Chancery Lane, London, carrying on business as a linen-draper. Later he removed into Chancery Lane itself, and is described in the lease as a sempster or milliner. In the end of 1626 he married Rachel Floud, a great-grand-niece of Cranmer, and it is not improbable that from her uncle George Cranmer, who had been a pupil and friend of Hooker, he may have derived the materials for his life of the great divine. His wife died in August 1640 after giving birth to an infant daughter—the two sons she had borne him were already dead. About 1644 he retired from business with such a modest competence as sufficed for his simple wants, and in 1647 he married Ann Ken, half-sister of the future bishop, then a boy ten years old. She bore him a daughter, Anne, who married Dr Hawkins, a prebendary of Winchester, and died in 1715, and two sons, of whom the younger survived him, became a canon of Salisbury, contributed largely to Walker's Sufferings, and died in 1719. Walton lost his second wife in 1662, and buried her in Worcester Cathedral. Wood tells us he spent most of his time 'in the families of the eminent clergymen of England, of whom he was much beloved.' He had been a close friend of Dr Donne, vicar of St Dunstan's, the parish he lived in, and was urged by Sir Henry Wotton to collect materials for the life of the poet-dean. Donne's sermons being about to be reprinted without a life, Walton himself took up the task, left untouched by Sir Henry at his death in 1639, and so produced under the spur of necessity one of the most delightful biographies in miniature within English literature. Already in 1631 he had mourned Donne's death in an Elegy, in which he calls himself his convert. Others among his intimate friends were Morley and Sanderson, after the Restoration bishops of Worcester (then Winchester) and Lincoln, while yet another friend, Dr King, was reinstated in the see of Chichester. In his later years he lived much at Winchester, closed his blameless life there in the house of his son-in-law, 15th December 1683, and was buried in Prior Silkstede's chapel in the south transept of the cathedral.
The first edition of The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, appeared in 1653; the fourth, grown from thirteen chapters to twenty-one, in 1676. The latter contained also Charles Cotton's 'Second Part of the Complete Angler, being Instructions how to Angle for Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream.' To the two original interlocutors, 'Piscator' and 'Viator,' Walton had already added in the second rewritten and greatly enlarged edition (1655) the falconer ('Auceps'), and changed 'Viator' into 'Venator.' A fishing expedition to the Hertfordshire streams between Ware and Waltham furnishes a slight narrative framework for the book, and after each of the three, the bird-catcher, the hunter, and the fisher, has commended in turn his own recreation, Piscator adopts Viator as his pupil in the art of angling, and discourses to him on the otter and chub, the trout, the artificial minnow and flies, the umber or grayling, the salmon, the luke or pike, the carp, the bream, the tench, the perch, the eel, the barbel, the gudgeon, ruffe, and bleak, the roach, dace, and caddis, the minnow or penk, loach, and bull-head or miller's thumb, of the various English rivers, of fish-ponds, and of rods and lines. The discourse is interspersed with scraps of dialogue, moral reflections, quaint old verses, songs, and sayings, and idyllic glimpses of country-life, and the whole breathes such cheerful piety and contentment, such sweet freshness and simplicity as to give the book a perennial charm altogether its own. Walton loved God and man with an unaffected simplicity of mind which cast a radiant atmosphere of happiness around all the idyllic pictures that he saw, for the charm of the book is not so much in the matter, or even the manner, as the unconscious picture of the writer's own disposition. The book was the delight of Charles Lamb's childhood. Writing to Coleridge, he says 'it breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of heart. . . . It would sweeten a man's temper at any time to read it; it would Christianise every discordant angry passion.'
Not less exquisite and indeed unique are his Lives—of Donne (1640), Wotton (1651), Hooker (1652), Herbert (1670, when the four were collected), and Sanderson (1678)—'Satellites burning in a lucid ring Around meek Walton's heavenly memory.' This was one of Dr Johnson's favourite books, and Boswell tells us he counted the Life of Donne as the most perfect of the five.
In the edition of Mr Thomas Westwood's Chronicle of 'The Compleat Angler' published on the two hundredth anniversary of Walton's death, there are enumerated as many as 97 editions, as compared with 117 in 1897—including editions by Andrew Lang (1897) and R. Le Gallienne (1897); by [Sir] John Hawkins (1760); Major (1824, 1835, 1844); Sir Harris Nicolas, with a good Life of Walton (1836); Dr G. W. Bethune (New York, 1847); Ed. Jesse and H. G. Bohn (1856); Dowling (1857); and a fac-simile of the original ed. (1876). Of the Lives there are editions by Dr Thomas Zouch, with a poor Life (York, 1796), Major (1825), and A. H. Bullen, with W. Dowling's Life (1884).