John Gilpin (18th century) was a based on real-life character whose exploits became legendary and featured in a well-known comic ballad of 1782 by William Cowper entitled The Diverting History of John Gilpin. Cowper had heard the story from a friend, Lady Austen.
He was said to be a wealthy draper from Cheapside in London, who owned land at Olney in Buckinghamshire, near where Cowper lived. It is likely that he was actually a Mr Beyer, a linen draper of the Cheapside corner of Paternoster Row. The poem tells how Gilpin and his wife and children became separated during a journey to the Bell Inn, Edmonton, after Gilpin loses control of his horse, and is carried ten miles further to the town of Ware.
There are a number of sites commemorating the exploits of John Gilpin, most notably Gilpin's Gallop, a street in the village of Stanstead St Margarets said to be on the original route taken by the horse's unfortunate pilot.
Famous quotes containing the words john and/or gilpin:
“People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)
“A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself—for it is from the soil, both from its depth and from its surface, that a river has its beginning.”
—Laura Gilpin (1891–1979)