3-053-754 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

A member of a Thames angling club, 1873. 'This pastime has always been in favour with middle-class Londoners, after the example of Master Izaac Walton, the literary shopkeeper of Fleet-street two hundred years ago...The Thames itself contains, in different parts of its course above London, large numbers of perch, tench, carp, jack or pike, bream, roach and dace, barbel and chub; the perch, especially, are fine in this river; the chub and barbel are very numerous where bushes overhang the water. The season is for bottomfishing from the end of May to the beginning of March, by order of the Thames Conservancy Board; but fly-fishing goes on all through the summer till September. The votaries of this superior art will travel fifty or sixty miles by railway, and return the same day, for the sake of casting a fly over the Whit, or any well-preserved stream in the Home Counties. An elderly citizen of modest pretensions, who shuns fatigue in the pursuit of his amusement, will perhaps consent himself with a day's punt-fishing between Richmond and Hampton Court, as we see him in our Illustration so agreeably occupied, to the manifest peril of unwary dace and silly gudgeon who are tempted by his artful practice'. From "Illustrated London News", 1873.