Opinion : Vinton's connection to ancient English literature

     Imagine reading a book from a century and a half and an an ocean away, and seeing in that book a name that you see every day on your way to work.

     I told you before that I am a slow reader. Here’s another reason why.

     In “A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickens writes about a man who has a side job as a grave robber. The man told his son that he was going “fishing,” and Dickens wrote a laugh-out-loud chapter about “fishing.” (Dickens, by the way, is much funnier than any American sitcom.)

    The grave-robber – with, wrote Dickens, his spade and rope and other fishing tools – met a friend. Dickens described this accomplice as a “fellow disciple of Izaak Walton.”

    Yes. That Izaak Walton. The one whose name you see every time you drive north of Vinton. Many of the members of the Izaak Walton League can tell you he was an English outdoorsman. He was also the author of one of the earliest English works that continues to be popular today.

   Our friends at the Red Cedar Chapter of the Izaak Walton League will tell you a bit about Mr. Walton, including the fact that his name is, indeed, spelled with a k. 

    Izaak Walton is famous for his love of the outdoors. He’s most famous for being the first to write (at least in English) a memorable book about fishing. He wrote “The Compleat Angler” in 1653.

   I was surprised at his reference to fly-fishing – I thought that was a modern American invention. I was also surprised at the intellectual nature of “Angler.” Walton was not only a fisherman; he was an avid reader who was familiar with some of the most famous works in literary history. And he cited many of them in “Angler.”

    Charles Dickens – living and writing more than 200 years after Walton first published “Angler” – was well aware of Izaak Walton’s legacy.

    Not bad for a work whose author said “may be thought as weak, and as unworthy of common view…”

    My journey with Dickens has taken me back centuries, back to the earliest English literature.

    I have read the poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” by Christopher Marlowe, as well as “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh. Marlowe was a young rural writer; Raleighdid not like the poem and wrote his as a sort of rebuke from an old poet to a young one.

    I have tried to read “Book of the Duchess,” a poem written in the 1300s by a an English poet named Geoffrey Chaucer. But the English language was still evolving into the version we can understand. Many of his words are hard to understand.

   But trying to comprehend his 650-year-old English is an interesting journey.

   I spent the entire weekend with the works I mentioned above. I got so lost in this little journey into literary history that I nearly forgot the book that inspired it.

   But I have returned to “Tale of Two Cities.” I still do not know who they dug up from the cemetery, or what happens at the wedding of Lucie Manatte and Charles Darnay. But at least I have had a glimpse into the lights that guided Charles Dickens, and I have taken a very small step on the long journey of words that guided him to his spot in literary history. It’s a journey, I think, that more of us should begin.