At five in the morning, on the 27th of November, 1810, a chimney sweep knocked on the door of a quiet house in London. The widow who lived there had not sent for him. Neither had the next sweep, or the twelve after that. Then came the coal wagons. Then the wedding cakes. By noon, half of London was fighting to reach her front door, and she had invited none of them.

The house was 54 Berners Street, home of a respectable widow named Mrs Tottenham. She had done nothing wrong. She had simply been chosen. Over the previous six weeks, as many as four thousand letters had gone out across the city in her name, each ordering a delivery or summoning a visitor, all timed for the same morning.

And so they came. Coal wagons from Paddington. A dozen bakers with towering wedding cakes. Bootmakers. Carts of furniture, pianos, and church organs. Forty fishmongers with lobsters and cod. Forty butchers, each carrying a leg of mutton. Fifty pastry cooks, bringing between them two and a half thousand raspberry tarts. Dentists. Midwives. Portrait painters. And, knocking politely, an undertaker, delivering a coffin built exactly to Mrs Tottenham's measurements.

Then it went up a level. Letters had also gone to the most powerful men in England. The Governor of the Bank of England came. The chairman of the East India Company came. The Duke of Gloucester came. The Lord Mayor of London arrived in his state carriage in full regalia, took one look, and drove straight to the magistrates to demand they stop it. They could not. Police blocked both ends of the street, and the deliveries kept coming until long after dark.

So who did this? Directly across the road, at an upstairs window, a twenty two year old named Theodore Hook sat watching it all, weeping with laughter. Hook was a comic writer and a famous prankster, and weeks earlier he had bet a friend that he could make any house in London the most talked-about address in the city. The prize for winning. One guinea. He had written four thousand letters and brought a capital city to a standstill, to win about a pound.

Hook was never caught. The police hunted for months and found nothing. He left town and said nothing for twenty five years, then dropped one line into a novel: I am the man. I did it. And to this day, no one knows why he chose Mrs Tottenham.

Dead serious. I do one of these every day. Subscribe.