No. 54 Berners Street was an unremarkable house in a quiet corner of London, until in 1810 it became the site of one of the most chaotic pranks in history. It started with a simple bet. As Stanley Walker reported in his review of essayist Agnes Repellier’s 1936 study of humor, a young writer named Theodore Hook, while out walking one morning, “wagered a companion a guinea that the neat house of a widow on Berners street would, within a week, be the most famous dwelling in London.”
His method was simple, his execution diabolical: Hook wrote letters to several hundred tradesmen around the city, ordering their services to fall upon the baffled widow’s doorstep at the exact same time. Pandemonium, predictably, ensued; mobs of people got into street fights.
One account notes with relish that Hook had invited not just soot-faced tradesmen, but the great and good.
“The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor rubbed elbows with undertakers, barbers, poulterers, coal-heavers, all conceivable classes of humanity, striving to deliver wares or obtain employment,” wrote Lionel Stevenson in a 1933 essay on the failures of late Romanticism. Understandably, the architect of the prank couldn’t resist a front-row seat to the results and, “from a rented room across the way, watched the indescribable turmoil.”
It’s a jape that ensured Hook’s “Berners Street Hoax” was discussed long after his death in 1841. In their 1867 listing of “Memorial Tablets of Great Men and Events,” the Journal of the Society of the Arts made sure to mention Hook and his deeds in far greater detail than his fellow Great Men. Yet in a calmer, less chaotic modern world, the Berners Street Hoax would by now be irrelevant. Today, it seems like a prelude to a darker, less innocent kind of prank: swatting.
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We’re not in fly-killing territory here, but somewhere equally violent. As the term suggests, swatting is a fake call to emergency services designed to bring Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams or heavily armed police to someone’s doorstep, despite a lack of any emergency.
Swatting is part of a family of activities tied to the emergence of digital media, hackers, and online gaming. Others include “distributed denial of service attacks” (DDoSing), which block users from sites, and doxxing, which leaks a user’s personal information—name, address, etc.—to the public. Combined with smearing a victim’s name, doxxing can lead to threats, stalking, and violence. Yet as late as 2017, scholar Silke Jandl noted that “prosecution for doxxing and those who make personal information available online is often impossible, especially since law enforcement is often struggling to understand the crime at all.”
But the law has had to catch up fast, as swatting has bled from a gamer-on-gamer prank into the political sphere. In the weeks before the 2024 American election, the US Capitol Police Chief testified that members of Congress had faced over fifty swatting attacks. With swatters testing the limits of police trigger discipline, by reporting a mass shooting or potential bomber, these attacks can—and in some cases have—lead to real shootings. Unlike Hook’s boisterous prank, when SWAT teams fall upon a house now, they do so armed and ready.
Apart from potential bloodshed at the victim’s expense, something more insidious could be at play if attacks remain persistent. Swatting risks a rise in mistrust where trust is needed most, with emergency service people conditioned to doubt callers, potentially leading to death if help is delayed—or worse, not deployed at all.
As far back as 1999, Angela Cora Garcia and Penelope Ann Parmer warned that calls could go wrong psychologically. They note that “doubt or skepticism may be a more natural posture for a police call-taker in a situation which could potentially be a hoax call, or in which a caller may be trying to get someone in trouble by complaining about them to the police.” Pranks like swatting erode the fundamental fabric of societal trust. Without that key social glue, suspicion can leap to the forefront of these charged interactions.
“One aspect of the attitude of daily life is the assumption that certain things can and must be taken for granted in order for interactants to successfully coordinate their actions,” Garcia and Parmer caution. If the 911 operator is primed to doubt when they go through their “interrogative series,” a set of questions to categorize the emergency scenario being called in, then the “information game” of high-stress communication analysis is rigged from the start.
And when the game goes wrong, lives are endangered. Garcia and Parmer based their findings on an event in 1998, when, as outraged newspapers reported, a 911 operator “took a genuine ‘officers down’ call, argued with the caller, put him on hold, and failed to alert a dispatcher or supervisor.”
Like Hook, some swatters play their own game by gleefully watching their attack live—though at a distance. Recently, some savvy perpetrators hacked into their victim’s internet-connected devices, like webcams, so they could watch or stream the swatting to a wider online audience. When Florida police left one building after a hoax call, the BBC noted, “officers reported hearing someone insult them via the property’s internet-connected Ring doorbell.”
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There’s an eerie connection to Hook’s time, when the growth of the Georgian city changed how people viewed public life and its potential for performativity. As Marjean D. Purinton notes, London, grown large and boisterous by the late eighteenth century, had become charged and energized.
“The city street scene became a new geography where conduct was refined and gendered,” Purinton writes. “All the world of Georgian London was a stage, and the city was a theatricalized space as imaginary and as spectacular as the drama in which it was represented.”
In a world where a grandmother in Malaysia can watch an e-sports player in Milwaukee, this growing sense of daily theatricality is still there, and it’s gone viral.
What else can Hook’s era teach us about ours? The parallels are striking. His was a time of global conflict, consumerist excess, and ferocious climate change. The Napoleonic Wars, which raged from 1803 to 1815, pitted multiple empires, including the United Kingdom, Russia, and France, against each other. Like the drug fentanyl and other opioids today dubbed an American national emergency, gin was deemed a “Slow but Sure Poyson” that many at the time feared could “burn up the Human Race.” In his book Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, Patrick Dillon writes that “by 1723 each man, woman, child, market-woman and magistrate in London was getting through something like a pint of gin a week.” Faced with nationwide addiction, one reformer is quoted in Dillon’s book as wailing, “If this drinking spirit does not soon abate, all our arts, sciences, trade, and manufactures will be entirely lost, and the island become nothing but […] a distillery.”
Climate-wise, several centuries of cold weather (collectively known as the “Little Ice Age”) saw crops fail and, more quaintly, “frost fairs” open on thick ice that blanketed London’s River Thames . And in 1815 Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, spewed such an apocalyptic amount of ash that it played havoc with weather patterns in Europe, which soon after experienced “the year without summer,” a time of severe livestock mortality and what historical geologist Reinhold Leinfelder calls “the most severe famines of the nineteenth century in the northern hemisphere.”
Much like our own time, Hook’s era was one of revolutions in communication. Many of the postal systems we take for granted today—with sorting houses, postal districts, uniformed letter carriers on foot (or horse-drawn vehicles)—were transforming the post into a far quicker, cheaper, and more effective system than it had ever been. (Despite this sea change, though, it was still early days. The humble public post box we slip letters into today was only introduced in England in the 1850s, a decade after Hook’s death).
Why else should we still examine Hook and his obscure prank performed two centuries ago? An apt question, and one that leads us to the ever-popular query “why study history at all?” In “Why History? Thinking about the Uses of the Past,” Frank Stricker burnishes the value in his field by deflating others. After all, he tuts, “Physics does not tell us how to act […] and psychology is not a smashing success at spreading happiness.” Conversely, history, he argues, encourages us to reflect on mankind’s inherent flaws as well as its successes, its looming risks and opportunities.
In short, he presents the long-held argument that the past teaches us about the present. Just as importantly, history is an end in and of itself, a rich excuse to investigate ourselves.
“At rock bottom, the presence of many pasts in every fleeting present argues that the why-history question is, finally, a question of why we should reflect at all,” Stricker writes—though too much reflection on the past can still leave us at the mercy of fate.
Herodotus, the ancient Greek father of history, had a surprisingly pessimistic view of the field he invented: “Of all man’s miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and to be impotent to act.” Perhaps that’s why Hook’s japes hold a kernel of wisdom; the knowledge that when all else fails, finding the fun in absurd chaos (say, on a quiet London street) is an apt response to a chaotic world.
Whether Hook would chuckle at the fate of his family is another matter. When his daughter was near death in 1893, she was destitute. A friend responded lovingly—by doxxing her. He shared her address with the world in the hope that donations would trickle in and ease her final days. In an open letter, he wrote, “Mr. Algernon Ashton pleads on behalf of a daughter of Theodore Hook, Mrs. Mary Tanner, who is seventy-three, a widow, in failing health and very reduced circumstances.” He added, “The poor lady’s address is 4, Agnes Terrace, Lancaster Road, Leytonstone, where subscriptions will be thankfully received.” History doesn’t record whether this plea was met with a merry hail of fat envelopes or with silence.
Fittingly, Hook’s life before and after his prank was as scandalous as you’d expect. He was at various times an author, opera-writer, socialite, heavy gambler, and for several years, the treasurer of Mauritius. In his joyous pen portrait of Hook, Stevenson wrote that Hook’s “fat form, purple face, and twinkling black eyes were welcome in every walk of society, from royal salons to the prisons in which he spent several years. In him the prevailing talent for improvisation rose to the level of genius.”
Despite earning a fortune as an author and editor, Hook couldn’t help but live large. Consequently, he died thirty thousand pounds in debt. While his end was ignoble, he represents a type of rascal who centers his life around creating outrageous, unignorable comedy—much like many influencers today. Writing Hook’s biography after his death, tAgnes Repplier marveled at how he found, “without the aid of philosophy, that pleasure has its own law of being. He had stirred the world—his world—to laughter.”
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