Review : Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London by Jacqueline Riding. A guest review by LH Member, the historian Margaret Willes.
The hard streets of the title are located in 19th-century Walworth, in south London. Still countryside at the beginning of the century, by 1900 this had become one of the most built up parts of not only the capital, but of Britain, with a population of an estimated 120,000 crammed into a relatively small area, and many of this population in deep poverty.
Charlie Chaplin was born here in 1889, and his early life, and that of his family are considered, with his autobiography providing invaluable detail. However, Jacqueline Riding’s book begins with an earlier inhabitant of Walworth, George Tinworth, the son of a wheelwright, born in 1843 in Milk Street. He too has left us his autobiography, but being two generations older, he did not enjoy the results of improvements in state education, particularly the Act of 1870, and thus his descriptions are picturesquely misspelt.
Tinworth in his youth worked with his alcoholic father, but from an early age he began carving and sculpting in the family wheelwright workshop. He did so in secret, ‘for in the eyes of the elder Mr Tinworth such trifling as this was mere wicked waste of time that ought to be better spent in tinkering up a costermonger’s broken cart’. However, a carving that George made of the Old Testament Samuel was shown by his mother to a neighbour eliciting the response that he had artistic promise, and thus encouraged he sought out the Lambeth School of Art.
Established in 1854, the School’s principal, John Sparkes, a Royal Academy trained sculptor, had developed a relationship with Henry Doulton, whose ceramic factory was located on the Lambeth waterfront. I had always assumed that Doulton’s, who are now known for their fine bone china with the accolade of ‘Royal’, had begun their existence producing such wares. In fact, the company originally produced industrial ceramics, providing the pipes, tiles and associated sanitary appliances for the engineer Joseph Bazalgette to overhaul London’s sewage system and combat the cholera epidemic and the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 when the crisis was literally under the noses of parliamentarians at Westminster. After years of persuasion, Sparkes convinced Henry Doulton to commission terracotta decoration for the exterior of an extension to his premises, modelled by members of the Lambeth School.
George Tinworth joined first the Lambeth School of Art, and then the Royal Academy schools before joining Doulton’s in 1867, working as a pottery decorator and sculptor. Such was his talent that he was accorded special status within the firm, with his own studio and assistants, drawing praise from leading critics such as John Ruskin. In 1881 he married Alice, and it was she who helped him to produce his autobiography, which he illustrated with photographs.
Charlie Chaplin was born 1889 in the same neighbourhood where Tinworth had been brought up. The latter had become an artist of international repute, and moved to the leafier groves of Kew, but Chaplin experienced a similarly grim upbringing. He claimed that his grandfather was a bootmaker from Ireland, and that he was born in rooms above his shop in East Street. However, his family’s origins are disputed and as Jacqueline Riding points out, Charlie loved a good story. It is more probable that both sides of his family were Romany in origin.
The workhouse dominates the story of Charlie Chaplin’s childhood. His maternal grandmother, Mary Ann Hill, an alcoholic with mental problems, entered Newington Workhouse in 1893, followed some time later by her estranged husband Charles Frederick. Conditions were not so awful as they had been earlier in the century, with more emphasis on health and education, but such comparisons are relative, and going into the workhouse remained a badge of failure and shame.
Charlie Chaplin’s parents, Charles Senior and Hannah, were both music hall performers, and the first years of life were comparatively comfortable for Charlie and his half-brother Syd, but the breakdown of the marriage plunged them into dire poverty. Charlie Chaplin Senior refused to support his family financially, and inevitably Hannah, Syd and Charlie were forced into the workhouse. A court injunction was imposed but this proved merely a temporary solution and when Charles Senior died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 37, once more Hannah, like her mother before her, returned to the workhouse suffering from the collapse of her mental health.
Charlie meanwhile began to get odd jobs, including in the theatre, to make ends meet. In 1908, he was introduced by Syd to the entrepreneur Fred Karno, who had established palatial premises in Camberwell. Initially Fred was reluctant to employ Charlie, and wrote later ‘I must say that when I first saw him, I thought he looked much too shy to do any good in the theatre, particularly in the knock-about comedies that were my speciality’. But it was years of observing and imitating characters of the South London streets that provided precisely Chaplin’s comic potential, and Fred came to realise this. As Chaplin’s son was to say: ‘It was really my father’s alter ego, the little boy who never grew up: ragged, cold, hungry, but still thumbing his nose at the world.’
The Chaplin brothers experienced a real turn of fortune, with a mansion flat on the Brixton Road as a centre to return to after touring. But in October 1912 Charlie decided to leave London for good, finding fame and fortune in America. The following year George Tinworth died on a train travelling into central London.
While Tinworth and Chaplin are the main focus of the book, in telling their stories Jacqueline Rider introduces a huge cast of characters, including many of the great and the good, and the not so good, of 19th-century London. Predictably Charles Dickens enters the story: his family had spent time in the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark for debt, and he wrote haunting descriptions of the early Victorian workhouse in his novels. Perhaps more of a surprise is the poet Robert Browning, born in 1812 and baptised at the York Street Chapel in Camberwell. In 1890 the chapel was renamed Browning Hall and under the aegis of Francis Stead, brother of the radical journalist and social campaigner Herbert, became a Settlement on the lines of Toynbee Hall in East London, providing education and recreation for the local population. It was one of several such enterprises established in the area.
Other unexpected participants include Henry Morton Stanley, famous for ‘finding’ the missionary David Livingstone in Africa. When he stood as Liberal MP for North Lambeth in 1892. his artist wife, Dorothy Tennant, accompanied him to the hustings. She was described in the press as ‘known as a kind lover of the “street Arabs”’, capturing in sketches their ‘childish grace, their droll gestures, their wayward frolics, with a touch of womanly pity and charity’. And George Duckworth half brother to Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, who conducted a survey of Walworth for Charles Booth of poverty maps fame, wandering the streets in his top hat, studiously ignored by the resident population.
The book at times challenges the reader with the immense amount of interwoven detail, along with a challenge to perceptions. But by focusing on two figures in particular, Jacqueline Riding drives the complex narrative forward. She concludes her rich account with a coda about her own family in South London, weaving in some of the characters described in the main part of the narrative.
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Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London, 432pp, by Jacqueline Riding was published by Profile Books in February 2026 with a cover price of £25 but available for less.
