Walton was born in Stafford and moved to London when he was in his teens in order to learn a trade. The Compleat Angler reflects the author s connections with these two locations. The book was dedicated to John Offley of Madeley, Staffordshire, and there are references in it to fishing in the English Midlands. However, the work begins with Londoners making a fishing trip to the Lea Valley in Hertfordshire. 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