Waltonising or Greenland Fisherman, c.1830

The 1820s and 1830s witnessed a dramatic growth in the fashion for angling among Britain’s urban middle class. This craze was reflected in a growing number of caricatures by Seymour and his contemporaries. On the far left, an angler dressed in fashionable country attire is engaged in a heated conversation with an army officer whose line has become entangled with his own. In the centre two dandies demonstrate their incompetence at the sport as they try to scoop a piglet out of the river. On the far right, another smartly dressed but clearly disinterested angler lets his rod dangle ineffectively into the water – a clear jibe at those who took part in the sport purely because it was fashionable. In the title of this work, ‘Waltonizing’ refers to Izaak Walton, the author of the 1653 treatise The Compleat Angler. A revised edition of this seventeenth-century manual, published in 1824, was hugely popular at the time. Underneath the print, the quote ‘Be quiet to go a-Angling’ is taken from the second chapter of Walton’s book. This advice dramatically contrasts the chaotic scene above. The subtitle ‘Green-land Fisherman’ refers to the ancient thoroughfare of Green Lane, which ran alongside the River Lea through the London suburb of Harringay, a popular out-of-town spot for fishing at the time. This caricature of angling was published by Thomas McLean in the 1830s. It may have been a forerunner to the series of humorous lithographic illustrations that Seymour was commissioned to produce for Richard Penn’s Maxims and Hints for an Angler: and Miseries of Fishing (1833).

Born in Somerset, Robert Seymour was apprenticed to a London pattern designer before taking up art. Turning from history painting, the correct subject for all aspiring young artists, he became a comic illustrator following the style of his contemporary George Crookshank even to the extent of signing some of his work: "Short Shanks". He learnt to engrave on copper and stone and illustrated a number of humorous journals and books in the early 1830s. Repeating one of Henry Alken Snr’s favourite themes, he portrayed the sporting adventures of Londoners who ventured into the countryside. This led the publishers Chapman & Hall to commission Charles Dickens to write a text, Pickwick Papers, to accompany Seymour’s sketches. Only two issues were published before the unstable Robert Seymour committed suicide on 20 April 1836.