Rivers, Monstrosity and National Identity in Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler

In Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, rivers offer Walton a calculus—and an ecology—of national identity. Though most remember Walton’s description of fish and angling, English waterways are just as significant to his nostalgic vision of Englishness. For Walton, rivers are both distinctly English but also the very juncture that connects England to the outside world and so potentially dangerous. Even the most celebrated of England’s rivers, the Thames, arrives at ‘the very jaws of the ocean’ and ‘feeleth the violence and the benefit of the sea more than any other river in Europe’. As the ocean affects it the Thames becomes a site of spiritual and epistemological disruption which brings ‘strange fish’. In a post-civil war context, these sites of connection and conflict between England and the outside world, between the known and the unknown, between the normative and the unnatural, reflect both England’s borders but also its battlegrounds within: they mark a physical boundary of Englishness, while also housing strangers within the midst of England. This essay considers how, as Walton attempts to instruct his reader in the art of the good life, his discourse returns again and again to waterways and their relationship to monstrosity.