Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Stoddart, Thomas Tod
STODDART, THOMAS TOD (1810–1880), angler and poet, was born on 14 Feb. 1810 in Argyle Square, Edinburgh. He was the eldest son of Captain (afterwards Admiral) Pringle Stoddart, a descendant of the Stouthearts of Liddesdale and Ettrick, and his wife Frances, daughter of James Sprot. At the age of ten he was sent to a Moravian school in Lancashire, but soon returned to attend the high school and the university of his native city. One of his professors was John Wilson, the celebrated ‘Christopher North,’ in whose house young Stoddart met De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, the Ettrick Shepherd, Aytoun, Ferrier, Henry Glassford Bell, and others. He early began to evince a passion for angling, which afterwards became the chief business of his life. He was a very expert angler, having much delicacy of wrist, and a great knowledge of the haunts and habits of fish, besides being an adept at fly-making. In 1833 he was admitted a member of the faculty of advocates, but never practised. He busied himself with the preparation of papers on the ‘Art of Angling,’ which appeared in ‘Chambers's Journal,’ and were published in 1835 in book form—the first treatise of its kind that appeared in Scotland. In 1836 he married and settled in Kelso, where he found the surroundings so congenial for the practice of his art in the rivers Tweed and Teviot that it became his home for life. In 1847 he published ‘The Angler's Companion to the Rivers and Lakes of Scotland’ (3rd edit. 1892), which still remains an angling classic in Scotland, being distinguished from others by its Waltonian note of appreciation of natural scenery and literary excellence. His later life was devoted to fishing in his home streams, and in the Yarrow and other western rivers. He was much interested in the acts against the pollution of rivers, and several times gave evidence before the Tweed commissioners and parliamentary committees on these and kindred subjects. He died on 21 Nov. 1880, and was buried in Kelso cemetery. By his wife Bessie Macgregor, daughter of a farmer at Contin in Ross-shire, whom he met while on a fishing tour, he had two sons and a daughter Anna. Miss Stoddart became the biographer of her father and also of Professor Blackie. An engraved portrait by Charles Laurie is prefixed to ‘Angling Songs’ (1889) and a photograph to ‘Songs of the Seasons’ (1881).
Besides the works mentioned Stoddart was the author of: 1. ‘The Death-wake, or Lunacy: a Necromaunt in three chimeras,’ 1831, which was surreptitiously published in America in 1842 in ‘Graham's Magazine’ as ‘Agatha, a Necromaunt in three chimeras, by Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro’ (new edit. 1895). 2. ‘Angling Reminiscences,’ 1837. 3. ‘Angling Songs,’ 1839 and 1889. 4. ‘Abel Massinger, or the Aëronaut,’ 1846, a romance in prose. 5. ‘An Angler's Rambles, and Angling Songs,’ 1866. 6. ‘Songs of the Seasons,’ 1873; new edit. with autobiographical memoir, Kelso, 1881. He was also a contributor to ‘Bell's Life,’ ‘The Field,’ and the ‘Sporting Gazette.’
[Stoddart's Autobiography; Stoddart's Angling Songs, edited by his daughter with Memoir; Stoddart's Death-wake, with Introduction by Andrew Lang, 1895; personal information.]