A Book On Angling - Reviews

Reviews

In 1881, Osmund Lambert in Angling Literature in England wrote:

Under the title" A Book on Angling," by Francis Francis, we have a very comprehensive treatise on the art of angling in all its branches. Mr. Francis is not only a well-known author, but also a well-known practical fisherman of great experience. No book so well answers the angler's purpose as the one just mentioned, which has already passed through five editions.

— Osmund Lambert, 1881

In 1920, when A Book on Angling was reprinted, Sir Herbert Maxwell, a noted Scottish angler penned this in the Editor's Introduction:

...but it is a much further cry to that distant day in 1867 when I opened a parcel containing Francis Francis's A Book on Angling, a gift from the author. Of the intervening halfcentury I have spent, serious persons may say wasted a considerable section by the waterside, and another section by the fireside combing some of the vast amount of angling literature that has flowed from the press during that period; but in all these years I have never detected any fallacy in Francis's precepts for such branches of the fisher craft as I have practised, neither have I handled any book which gives such succinct and trustworthy instruction in every form of freshwater angling. Excellent treatises upon this or that department of the sport might be named; but Francis dealt with them all; his experience of them was universal, his knowledge encyclopaedic.

— Sir Herbert Maxwell, 1920

James Robb in an entire chapter devoted to Francis Francis in Notable Angling Literature (1945) said of A Book on Angling:

A Book on Angling. This is admittedly the most valuable of his many contributions. For almost twenty years Francis collected his material; he visited and fished nearly every river of note in the kingdom in search of information. The tangile result was a comprehensive manual, first published in 1867, dealing with every known branch of fresh-water angling and set out in practical and concentrated form. The sixth edition (1885) is still on sale and is in fair demand.

— James Robb, 1945

In 1974, noted American writer Arnold Gingrich in his The Fishing in Print commented on Francis, Francis as a writer and his influence on notable American angler Theodore Gordon:

A man of taste and intelligence, he was a good, restrained, yet warm and exciting fishing writer, a reader who knew Chaucer as well as Walton and Thoreau, Thad Norris (The American Angler's Book, 1864) as well as Frederic Halford (Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice, 1889), and a devoted follower of the great Francis, Francis (A Book on Angling, 1867).

— Arnold Gingrich, 1974

In 2002, 135 years after the 1st edition of A Book of Angling, Tony Hayter in his biography of Frederic M. Halford wrote:

No one responded to this charm more than the redoubtable Francis Francis, Angling Editor of The Field from 1856 to 1883. This journal had paramount influence in the sporting world of the nineteenth century--a research project into the history of almost any sport in Britain would have to begin with The Field. For anglers it played an important role in pulling together numerous angling practices and attitudes, and assisting them towards becoming developed schools or doctrines. And for nearly thirty years the writing was mainly done by Francis (F.F. to his friends.) The Field paid him an honorarium of £200 a year, for which they got good value.

— Tony Hayter, F.M. Halford and the Dry Fly Revolution, 2002