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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Izaak Walton's "The Complete Angler," first published in 1653, is a rich tapestry woven with elements of prose, poetry, and practical advice, celebrating the art of angling. Through a series of dialogues, primarily between the fishermen Venator and Piscator, Walton delves into the philosophical and pastoral aspects of fishing, presenting it not merely as a sport but as a serene escape that fosters contemplation and connection with nature. The distinct literary style combines pastoral imagery and an almost lyrical quality, while its context during the Restoration period reveals a yearning for simplicity and harmony with nature amidst the complexities of urban life that characterized 17th-century England. Izaak Walton, an English writer and biographer, was deeply influenced by his own experiences as an angler. His fascination with fishing and the natural world echoes throughout his works, particularly in an era marked by turbulence and transition. Walton's background as a businessman and his interactions with prominent literary figures of his time, such as John Donne and Robert Burton, enriched his understanding of human nature and pastoral life, informing his writing in "The Complete Angler." This seminal work is a must-read for both fishing enthusiasts and lovers of nature writing alike. Walton's blend of practical guidance with philosophical musings will resonate with readers seeking both knowledge and tranquility. "The Complete Angler" not only educates but invites readers into a contemplative journey, making it a timeless literary gem. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Complete Angler 1653
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the confluence of craft and contemplation, The Complete Angler invites readers to discover how a simple pastime can shape a way of life. First published in 1653, Izaak Walton’s work emerges from mid-seventeenth-century England as a distinctive blend of practical handbook and pastoral reflection. It is not merely about catching fish; it is about cultivating a temperament attuned to patience, observation, and companionship. Written in accessible prose that favors conversation over proclamation, it welcomes novices and veterans alike, promising instruction while also offering a quiet refuge from the clamor of the age that produced it.
The book straddles genres: part fishing manual, part nature writing, part dialogue, and part miscellany. Its scenes unfold along English streams and meadows, where the reader is invited to walk, listen, and learn. Published during a time of social and religious upheaval, the work presents a counterimage of order and harmony found in the countryside. Walton draws on the customs and practical knowledge of his era, shaping them into a companionable guide. The result is a text that moves fluidly between the tactile world of tackle and rivers and the more reflective territories of ethics, friendship, and repose.
The premise is disarmingly simple: an experienced angler converses with a companion, demonstrating methods and habits while revealing a philosophy of recreation. Lessons in bait, seasons, and rivercraft unfold amid digressions—songs, verses, brief stories, and culinary notes—that enrich the journey. The voice is genial and hospitable, preferring persuasion through example and anecdote rather than argument. Readers encounter a book to be strolled through rather than rushed, one that rewards lingering over details. Its mood is serene without being static, alive to weather and water, and alert to the subtle pleasures of a day spent outdoors in good company.
As a manual, The Complete Angler catalogues the practice of angling as it was known in Walton’s time: the behavior of fish, the preparation of gear, the timing of expeditions, the fit between method and environment. Yet instruction is never merely technical. Each practical counsel is paired with a stance toward the world—attentive, temperate, and curious. The dialogue format models teaching as an art of listening as much as telling, and the book’s cadence echoes the unhurried pace of a stream. Prose, anecdote, and pastoral vignette combine to make learning feel like shared discovery.
Thematically, the work dwells on patience, restraint, and the ethical use of leisure. It suggests that careful attention to nature can refine the senses and temper the will, shaping a character capable of calm amid change. Friendship and hospitality play central roles, as knowledge is passed not by rules but through generous conversation. Spiritual overtones are present yet unobtrusive, appearing as gratitude and reverence rather than doctrine. The book repeatedly links right practice to right feeling: to fish well is to observe well, and to observe well is to live with greater humility, wonder, and care.
For contemporary readers, The Complete Angler offers an early model of mindful practice grounded in place. Its slow tempo and descriptive clarity invite a way of reading that mirrors the activity it portrays: patient, receptive, and attuned to small increments of time. The book raises enduring questions about how to spend one’s hours, what counts as meaningful recreation, and how craft knowledge can foster respect for living systems. Its environmental sensitivity—rooted in careful watching and restraint—feels newly pertinent. Even for those who never fish, it provides a vocabulary for savoring ordinary landscapes and strengthening reflective habits.
Walton revised and expanded the book across later editions, and in the later seventeenth century Charles Cotton contributed a substantial continuation on fly-fishing, a testament to the work’s growing influence. Yet the 1653 publication remains the foundational expression of Walton’s vision: an art of angling inseparable from an art of living. Its longevity owes less to technical specifics than to its companionable tone and capacious curiosity. Approached today, it reads as both a historical document and a living guide, inviting readers to step beside the water, attend to the world before them, and let skill mature into contemplation.
Synopsis
Published in 1653, The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton is a pastoral dialogue that blends practical instruction in freshwater fishing with reflections on rural life, friendship, and quiet virtue. Framed as a walk through the English countryside, the book presents conversations in which an experienced angler, termed Piscator, introduces companions to the pleasures and disciplines of his art. Part manual, part miscellany of songs, poems, and anecdotes, it moves between technical advice and scenes of hospitality. The tone remains calm and modest, aiming to instruct novices while celebrating temperance and contentment, and to show angling as a contemplative recreation within a harmonious landscape.
Walton opens with a chance meeting on a May morning among three figures representing field sports: Piscator the angler, Venator the hunter, and Auceps the fowler. Each praises his recreation, but Piscator argues that angling affords the most innocent and tranquil delight, joined with skill and patience. The conversation remains courteous, supported by citations from classical and contemporary authorities. Venator, intrigued by the angler’s gentle claims, accepts an invitation to walk and learn along the riverside. Auceps soon parts from them, leaving master and novice to continue. This sets the narrative path: a leisurely journey in which instruction unfolds amid observation and conversation.
As they leave the road for meadows and brooks, Piscator begins with first principles. He describes the angler’s tackle—rod, line, hook, and float—their proper proportions, and the means to make them. He discusses lines of hair or silk, the tying of knots, and the virtues of neat, unobtrusive gear. Care for the water, courtesy to landowners, and moderation in taking fish appear alongside craft advice. Walton grounds technique in season, weather, and water clarity, urging early rising, quiet steps, and careful watching. Authorities from natural history are cited to support practice, while proverbs and short verses make the lessons memorable.
Attention turns to particular fish of running streams, especially trout and chub. Piscator explains how to read currents, choose swims under banks and near weeds, and vary approaches by season. He outlines live-bait and artificial methods, including using the natural fly, the palmer, and other imitations made with simple materials. Instructions cover baiting with worms properly scoured, presenting minnows, and striking and playing fish without breaking light tackle. Alongside technique, he offers notes on habits—feeding times, favored haunts, and reactions to weather. Throughout, Walton emphasizes patience and observation, presenting angling as a skill honed by practice rather than chance.
Piscator next surveys still-water and slower river species: carp, tench, barbel, bream, roach, dace, perch, and eels. For each, he summarizes reputed qualities, preferred habitats, and baits—pastas and pastes for carp, gentles and worms for many coarse fish, cheese for chub, and wasp-grubs for dace. The pike receives special notice as a bold predator requiring stronger tackle, wire, and live-bait or dead-bait rigging. Walton quotes earlier writers on breeding, longevity, and pond-keeping, though he balances report with practical cautions. The instruction remains methodical: ground-baiting, timing, and quiet station-keeping are urged as much as any clever device or lure.
Instruction is interleaved with social interludes that depict a hospitable countryside. At inns and cottages the travelers are welcomed to plain meals, music, and conversation. Songs are exchanged—the angler’s song, a milk-maid’s tune—and brief poems praise fields, brooks, and temperance. Companions such as Peter and Coridon join them for stretches, sharing local knowledge and good cheer. These pauses reinforce the book’s calm temper: angling is not solitary retreat alone but fellowship ordered by modesty and good manners. Walton uses these scenes to refresh the reader between technical passages and to suggest how the sport fits within a measured, civil life.
Practicalities of preparing and keeping fish accompany the sport. Directions are given for dressing pike, carp, trout, or perch, and for simple sauces and seasonings suited to fresh catches. Household counsel appears—how to cleanse fish, how long to keep them, and when to prefer release over the table. Natural history tidbits, drawn from writers like Pliny, Gesner, and Dubravius, record lore about breeding, spawning seasons, and reputed cures, though Walton signals uncertainties and defers to experience. The effect is a compendium: part cookbook, part bestiary, part field guide, always returning to the steady rhythms of brook and bank.
Through instruction and shared excursions, Venator’s curiosity grows into competence and affection for the sport. Under Piscator’s guidance he makes his first casts, learns to mend his line, and begins to take fish, observing the calm required at each stage. The journey brings them to quiet reaches and friendly doors, where they part with mutual respect. The close affirms the novice’s welcome into an informal brotherhood of anglers, bound not by secrecy but by patience and practice. Walton ends without climax, offering a valediction that joins blessing with counsel to keep peace and thankful hearts, and to return season by season.
Taken together, the book presents angling as an art joined to a way of living—temperate, observant, and grateful. Its sequence moves from debate to companionship, from tools and methods to species and seasons, interspersed with sociable rests, music, and simple fare. The central message is consistent: quiet recreation, rightly pursued, fosters contentment and civility. By keeping instruction concrete and the pace unhurried, Walton makes a manual that is also a pastoral portrait of mid-seventeenth-century English fields and streams. The Compleat Angler closes by inviting readers to practice skill and humility, to love clean rivers, and to study to be quiet.
Historical Context
Set in the riverine landscapes just beyond London, The Compleat Angler unfolds along the Lea and its tributaries in Hertfordshire and Middlesex, with named waypoints such as Tottenham High Cross, Ware, and Amwell. Composed amid the 1630s–1650s seasons of hayfields and water-meadows, its dialogue strolls between inns, weirs, and parish greens. The time is contemporary with its first publication in 1653, when London’s turbulence lay within a day’s walk yet the countryside preserved older rhythms of husbandry, fishing seasons, and customary rights. The book’s scene blends lived topography with practical knowledge of local waters, reflecting a social world ordered by parish life, guild connections, and convivial hospitality.
The English Civil Wars (1642–1651) shattered political and social certainties. Key engagements—Edgehill (1642), Marston Moor (1644), Naseby (1645), and Worcester (1651)—ruined estates, divided parishes, and militarized London. Parliament controlled the capital, and many Royalist and Anglican households dispersed. Izaak Walton, a Royalist-leaning London tradesman born at Stafford (1593), retired from business by 1644 and spent long intervals in the Midlands. The Compleat Angler (1653) emerged as the wars ended, offering a vision of peaceable order against a backdrop of garrisoned towns and sequestrations. Its leisurely conversations, courtesy between strangers, and rituals of country hospitality implicitly answer a decade of campaigns and confiscations with a model of civility and concord.
The regicide of Charles I on 30 January 1649 inaugurated the Commonwealth and, from December 1653, the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. The 1643 Licensing Order tightened press control; the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) strained commerce and morale. Puritan moral regulation pressed upon sabbatarian conduct and public amusements, while earlier battles over the Declaration of Sports (issued 1618; reissued 1633) lingered in memory. Published in 1653 by T. Maxey for Richard Marriot in St. Dunstan’s Churchyard, Fleet Street, Walton’s book defends lawful recreation as a virtuous discipline. Its gentle apologia for angling as contemplative labor, socialized through song, prayer, and shared meals, subtly resists a climate wary of festivity and asserts the legitimacy of measured, restorative pastimes.
Religious conflict shaped the era’s texture of life. Archbishop William Laud’s reforms polarized the Church of England; he was executed in 1645. Parliament abolished episcopacy (1646) and replaced the Book of Common Prayer with the Directory for Public Worship (1645), while hundreds of clergy were sequestered. Walton, devoted to the older Anglican settlement and intimate with John Donne (d. 1631), George Herbert (d. 1633), and later Bishop George Morley, memorialized this tradition in his Lives. The Compleat Angler’s pieties—scriptural citations, doxologies, and reverent praise of creation—echo a Prayer Book ethos without polemic. Its harmonious fellowship of “Piscator,” “Auceps,” and “Venator” models an irenic parish culture at odds with sectarian rancor and the displacement of settled liturgical customs.
London’s guild and print economies anchor the book’s origins. Walton became a freeman of the Ironmongers’ Company in 1618 and kept a shop near St. Dunstan-in-the-West on Fleet Street, a parish tied to Donne, who was its rector from 1624. The Stationers’ Company regulated printing, yet the 1640s saw a surge of presses and booksellers around St. Paul’s and Fleet Street. The first edition of The Compleat Angler was printed in 1653 by Thomas Maxey for Richard Marriot, a notable publisher who had issued Donne’s Poems (1633). Walton’s urban network—clergy, diplomats like Sir Henry Wotton, and gentlemen—flows into a text that departs the city by foot and road to recover older social compacts along Hertfordshire streams.
The book mirrors the period’s contested waterways and rural economy. The New River (engineered by Hugh Myddelton, opened 1613) had already altered London’s water supply via Hertfordshire; the Lea’s fisheries, eel-traps, and weirs were subjects of statute and suit since the 1571 River Lee Act and earlier medieval prohibitions. Enclosure and the commercialization of meadowland pressed on customary rights. Walton’s dialogues notice weirs, muddy spates, and local fishing laws, and lament practices that “destroy” trout stocks, reflecting contemporary disputes about netting, private preserves, and common angling. Named reaches of the Lea and Thames, inn-stops, and otter-hunts situate his craft within a living economy of carriers, millers, and watermen whose interests could collide with those of recreational fishers.
A wider culture of natural inquiry also informed the work. Early modern readers knew Conrad Gessner’s Historiae Animalium (1551–1558), Jan Dubravius on fish ponds (1547), and classical authorities like Pliny; observation-driven knowledge advanced after William Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628). Informal meetings at Gresham College in the 1650s foreshadowed the Royal Society (founded 1660), encouraging empirical habits. The Compleat Angler blends citation with fieldcraft—seasons, baits, fish anatomy, and water conditions—exemplifying gentlemanly “practical philosophy.” Its measured empiricism, hospitably exchanged between master and scholar on the bank, embodies a social movement toward shared, verifiable knowledge, even as it cherishes inherited lore and the ethics of restraint that sustain rivers as common goods.
As social and political critique, the book advances a conservative defense of continuity, civility, and lawful recreation against the extremities of zeal and militarized governance. It exposes the period’s fractures—sectarian animosities, surveillance, and the erosion of parish solidarities—by staging courteous debate among strangers of different callings and ranks. Its praise of hospitality, fair pricing, and restraint in taking fish implicitly rebukes profiteering, enclosure abuses, and destructive exploitation. By reaffirming Prayer Book piety without controversy, it quietly contests the imposed religious settlement. The Compleat Angler thus models a commonwealth of manners—deferential, dialogic, and ecologically prudent—set against the harsh polarities and social dislocations of the Interregnum.
