London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Top of the morning to you London Walkers. Wherever you are.
It’s Thursday, December 18th, 2025.
And here it is, your daily London fix.
And sure enough, it’s another Literary London date. Now stamped indelibly on my mind at any rate.
Funny how this sometimes works. Put them together like this – one hard on the heels of the other – and it sets. Takes hold. I’ve known about both events pretty much forever. But exactly when they took place, I always had to look that up. They were sort of free floating. The emblazoning of today’s the day – that never became an automatic mental reflex. Until now.
Going forward I’ll think of these two as the Castor and Pollux of the Literary London universe in December. And they make their appearance, respectively, on December 17th and December 18th.
December 17th the day – in 1843 – A Christmas Carol was published. The writing’s always going to be on the calendar, so to speak. One sure fire consequence of that is going forward we’ll always run our Christmas Carol & Seasonal Traditions Walk on December 17th, the anniversary of the day the book was published. This time of year we run that walk lots – six, seven, eight times from late November to late December. But it didn’t happen yesterday. The date that arguably should be the sun in the solar system of Christmas Carol & Seasonal Traditions outings. Castor & Pollux, solar system – mixing my metaphors here – but you’ll get the idea. When the walk rolls around next year on December 17th that’s your sign, David hasn’t forgotten, he’s remembered the anniversary of the publication of A Christmas Carol and scheduled the London Walks programme accordingly.
And as for today, December 18th, well, who knows, maybe we’ll get a John Dryden’s London Walk created. And you can be sure it’ll always run on December 18th.
That said, we have been here before. Looking back, I see we stopped by here three years ago. December 18th, 2022. That time round I called it Poet Pummelled. And for a subtitle I dug out a contemporary account that said, “calling him rogue, and Son of a whore, they knockt him down and dangerously wounded him.”
So, yes, we’ve stopped by here before. Three years ago to be exact. This is a return visit to what happened on December 18th, 1679.
John Dryden, Poet Laureate,
jumped in the dark and beaten to within an inch of his life in Covent Garden.
A mugging with a literary motive. A beating brought on by a poem.
So no question about it, I’m going to own it.
This is a return visit.
It’s like going to the National Gallery or the British Museum a second time.
Why wouldn’t you do that?
And in London especially you do it because this is a city that rewards return visits.
Rewards them big time.
You stand in the same place and ask a different question.
Same alley, different angle.
Because the question this time is not simply who did it or where it happened. We know that. Rose Alley, outside the Lamb, the oldest pub in Covent Garden. Narrow, dirty, unlit. A perfect place for hired fists to do their work.
The better question is this.
What sort of poem could provoke a beating?
The answer is An Essay on Satire. Anonymous. Circulated in manuscript. Lethal in tone.
John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, the infamous Restoration poet and courtier, read it and assumed Dryden was the author. He was wrong. The poem was written by John Sheffield, an aristocrat safely insulated by rank. Dryden, by contrast, was reachable. Walkable. Breakable.
And the lines that triggered Rochester’s fury were not vague moralising. They were precise, insinuating and socially radioactive.
Take this passage, the one that set tongues wagging immediately.
“Well, sir, ’tis granted; I said Dryden’s rhymes
Were stol’n, unequal, nay dull many times;
What foolish patron is there found of his
So blindly partial to deny me this?”
At first glance it looks almost polite. A concession. Yes, Dryden has written dull lines. That happens. But this is a rhetorical feint. The speaker pretends to be fair minded in order to make the next blow land harder. He names Dryden directly. That alone was provocative. Naming living writers in satire was a declaration of war.
Then comes the real insult.
“But that his plays, embroidered up and down
With learning, just enough to please the town,
In the same paper, wrote with much ado,
Are stolen, or at least they smell so too.”
“Embroidered” here does not mean richly decorated. It means padded. Fake finery. Dryden’s learning, the thing he prided himself on, is reduced to theatrical costume jewellery. And then the killer phrase: “they smell so too”. Theft is suggested without being proved. Reputation is poisoned while deniability remains intact.
For a modern reader, think of accusing a public intellectual not of plagiarism outright, but of having the unmistakable whiff of it about them. Enough to make others step back.
Rochester would have read this and thought two things at once. First, that he himself was being targeted indirectly. The poem attacks court wits who survive by cleverness rather than virtue, men who thrive in corruption.
“For close designs and crooked counsels fit,
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit.”
This is not abstract. “Sagacious” means sharp. “Turbulent” means disruptive. “Crooked counsels” means morally bent advice whispered in royal ears. That is a thumbnail sketch of Rochester’s public reputation.
Second, Rochester would have thought, who dares write this?
Satire in Restoration England was hierarchical. Aristocrats could satirise other aristocrats. Rakes could mock ministers. But a professional writer, a laureate on a royal salary, was not supposed to turn satire upward. If Dryden had written this, it was not just rude. It was insubordinate.
And Rochester was not a man who believed insults should remain on paper.
Which is where the irony thickens. Rochester himself was one of the nastiest satirists England has ever produced. He knew exactly how words could wound.
In A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind he writes:
“Man differs more from man, than man from beast.”
This is not flattery of animals. It is an assertion that humans use “reason” as an excuse for cruelty and appetite. Strip away the polish and man is not elevated above the beast but degraded beneath him.
Rochester could also turn that venom on his king. Of Charles II he writes:
“Restless he rolls from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.”
“Poor” here does not mean short of cash. It means impoverished in character. Morally bankrupt. A devastating judgement disguised as a jaunty couplet.
And Rochester was perfectly capable of turning the blade on himself.
“I loathe myself, yet dare not say I do,
For fear I should be thought too vicious too.”
This is not repentance. It is bravado sharpened into self knowledge. Rochester knew the game was ugly and played it anyway.
So when he read An Essay on Satire, he recognised the terrain. What he could not tolerate was competition from someone he believed to be socially beneath him, doing satire as well as he did, perhaps better, and doing it anonymously.
Sheffield could hide behind rank. Dryden could not hide from suspicion.
Which brings us back to Rose Alley. Dark. Narrow. No witnesses. Dryden was set upon by men paid not to argue but to hurt. In Restoration London, words damaged reputations. Fists enforced hierarchy.
Dryden survived. Bruised, humiliated, alive. Rochester died young. Sheffield prospered. The Lamb kept serving ale.
And the stones stayed where they were.
That is why this story is worth retelling. Because it reminds us that literature once mattered enough to get you beaten senseless in the street. On December 18, 1679, in Covent Garden, satire drew blood.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com.
Home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £25 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London – you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Jack the Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians, university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.