Selected Writings

Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is best known for his graceful, lucid if not always practical book The Compleat Angler. It has stayed in print since it first appeared in 1653.
More than just a writer of devout pastoral, Walton is one of the fathers of modern literary biography. This selection includes his lively portraits of Donne, Herbert and others, and reminiscences of Jonson written in old age. A devoted churchman, in his writing Walton helps define what it was to be Anglican at a time when the Church was in upheaval. One historian said Walton `invented Anglicanism'. He certainly shaped it in ways which are potent today.
Walton is here set in a context which complicates and then corrects the reductive view of him, encapsulated by Gosse, as `that immortal piscatory linen-draper'.