Biography

John Gilpin was the featured subject in William Cowper's well-known 1782 comic ballad "The Diverting History of John Gilpin." Gilpin was supposedly based on a true person--a wealthy draper from Cheapside in London, near where Cowper lived. Cowper's 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 farther to the town of Ware."