Goswell Road & the Pickwick Papers – Dickens Was Here

Goswell Road in London is the historic setting for the opening scene of Charles Dickens's first novel, The Pickwick Papers, published from 1836 to 1837. Known as Goswell Street until 1864, the road served as the fictional address of Samuel Pickwick. Additionally, on May 9, 1770, street vendor James Parrott reportedly ran the world's first four-minute mile starting from Charterhouse Wall on Goswell Road.

London · from the walk “Clerkenwell Uncovered: From the World's First Tube to London's Radical Heart” · audio ~3 min · Generated

Goswell Road, London EC1V 7ER

Why is Goswell Road in London famous in English literature?

Look around you. This ordinary London street... was once the most Famous address in English literature.......... You are standing on Goswell Road. Until eighteen sixty-four, it was known simply as Goswell Street, and it was Here, on this very stretch of pavement, that Charles Dickens set the opening scene of his very first novel.......... The Pickwick Papers was first published in serial form from March eighteen thirty-six to November eighteen thirty-seven. Dickens was just twenty-four years old. And the story begins right where you're standing... with the loveable Mister Samuel Pickwick throwing open his chamber window on a May morning and gazing out at the world. Goswell Street to his left! Goswell Street to his right! Goswell Street as far as the eye could see!......... Now here's what most people don't know. The initial reception was Modest. Sales for the opening numbers hovered around just four hundred copies each. A disaster, really. But then... the introduction of the character Sam Weller in chapter ten marked a dramatic turnaround, and suddenly all of London went mad for Pickwick. Sales surged to twenty thousand by the tenth number and Forty thousand by the twentieth. The book became a publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandise.......... And the fictional drama that started it all? It happened right Here on Goswell Street. When Pickwick discussed taking on a servant, telling his landlady Missus Bardell that three could live as cheaply as two... she mistook this for a marriage Proposal. She fainted into his arms just as his friends walked through the door. The resulting breach of promise trial... Bardell versus Pickwick... became one of the most famous fictional legal cases in English literature.......... But Dickens wasn't the Only one to make history here. Did you know that nearly seventy years before Dickens was even born, this road may have witnessed the world's first four-minute mile? On the ninth of May, seventeen seventy, a costermonger named James Parrott — a common street seller of fruit and vegetables — started at the Charterhouse Wall right here on Goswell Road, crossed the road, turned right, and ran the length of Old Street finishing at the gates of Saint Leonard's church in Shoreditch. Men with whips and poles had been positioned to keep his way clear, and reportedly he covered the measured mile in exactly four minutes... almost two Hundred years before Roger Bannister's famous run in nineteen fifty-four. We have no primary source for the feat. The first record comes from Sporting Magazine in seventeen ninety-four — a full generation later. So take it with a pinch of salt... but what a story.......... From fictional landlady scandals to impossible athletic feats, Goswell Road has always been a place where extraordinary things happen... even when nobody's looking.

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