The wager, according to the story London has told ever since, was one guinea. In 1810 the writer and celebrated prankster Theodore Hook bet his friend Samuel Beazley that within a week he could transform any house in London into the most talked-about address in the city. He selected a target at random: the home of a Mrs Tottenham at 54 Berners Street, a respectable and entirely unremarkable house north of Oxford Street.
Hook then sat down and wrote letters — by most accounts around four thousand of them — in Mrs Tottenham’s name, requesting goods, services and visits, all for the same morning: 27 November 1810.
The morning everything arrived
It began at dawn with a dozen chimney sweeps, each summoned individually. Then came the coal wagons. Then cakes — wedding cakes, by the cart. Doctors, surgeons and lawyers arrived to attend a fictitious emergency; fishmongers delivered, cobblers came to measure, and around a dozen pianos were hauled up the street, along with, in the most cherished detail of the accounts, an organ. Every tradesman blocked the last one’s exit, and Berners Street corked itself solid with wagons, deliveries and increasingly furious professionals.
Hook had aimed higher than tradesmen, too. His letters — each baited with something its recipient couldn’t resist — reportedly drew the Governor of the Bank of England, the Lord Mayor of London, and even the Duke of Gloucester to the address. The chaos consumed much of the day; contemporary newspapers covered it with a mixture of outrage and barely concealed delight. Hook, naturally, had rented a room across the street, and spent the day at the window with his accomplice, watching his mail merge with reality.
Getting away with it
Suspicion fell on Hook almost immediately — this was, after all, extremely his style — but nothing was ever proved, no prosecution followed, and he prudently left town “for his health” until the temperature dropped. He went on to a career of novels, hoaxes and society wit; the street went back to sleep; and Mrs Tottenham, the only true victim, received history’s consolation prize of a footnote.
Two centuries later, the Berners Street hoax reads as something oddly familiar: a denial-of-service attack, executed in cake, coal and pianos, on a single physical address — proof that the internet didn’t invent trolling. It just removed the postage costs.
