The Compleat Angler

The Compleat Angler reflects the author's connections with these two locations, especially on the River Dove, central England, that forms the border between Staffordshire and Derbyshire in the Peak District.

However, the work begins with Londoners making a fishing trip up the Lea Valley in Hertfordshire, starting at Tottenham.

Walton was not sympathetic to the Puritan regime of the 1650s and the work has been seen as a reaction to the turbulence of the English Civil War and its aftermath; "the disorder of the present times received muted comment in the work's scenes of harmony", is the view of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The Compleat Angler was first published by the bookseller Richard Marriot, whose business was based in Fleet Street near where Walton had a shop.

Walton was a friend of Marriot's father John, who had started the business, but was in retirement by the time the book appeared.