‘Hard Streets’ by Jacqueline Riding review

Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London by Jacqueline Riding goes where few historians dare: south of the river.

Sarah Wise | Published in History Today Volume 76 Issue 2 February 2026

The Cut street market, Lower Marsh, 1890. London Metropolitan Archives/Bridgeman Images.

As with London black cab drivers after hours, historians of the metropolis tend not to want to go south of the river. Anyone seeking a comprehensive postwar volume on the totality of Bermondsey, Lambeth, Vauxhall, Walworth, Battersea, Southwark, Kennington, Brixton, and Stockwell will find thin pickings. Compare this to the huge body of work that exists on East London, for instance. Jacqueline Riding’s Hard Streets is a welcome corrective to this state of affairs. Ranging from the early 1840s to 1912 (when Chaplin abandoned London, and Britain, for good), Riding focuses on Walworth and Lambeth but branches out to the other districts whenever her narrative threads lead her there.

The title is a little misleading, for this is a work based around the life stories of two South London boys made good. The ‘Little Tramp’ was born in 1889; however, the first third of the book focuses on George Tinworth, sculptor and ceramic artist. Tinworth’s name would baffle most book browsers, so understandably the publisher has highlighted Chaplin in the subtitle. Both men wrote superb autobiographies in which they documented, without self-pity and without flinching, the brutal deprivation in which they grew up, and their escape routes – one through fine art, and the other through stage and film. Tinworth, a prodigy in carving and modelling, turned up at the door of the Lambeth School of Art in his teens with a stone bust of Handel he had completed, asking if he could enrol; by his late twenties he would be Doulton pottery’s principal artist. Chaplin, a natural mimic, was performing in a clog-dancing troupe by age nine. His later comic performances were informed by close study of the phenomena he had observed in the streets, lodgings, and pubs of his boyhood. ‘From such trivia, I believe my soul was born’, he would write in his 1964 memoir. This lonely child stored up scenes and ‘types’ that would eventually make him an international superstar. Rummy Binks, for instance – the bandy-legged drunk who minded the horses outside the Queen’s Head on Broad Street/Black Prince Road – contributed to the creation of the Little Tramp character.

The Chaplins and the Tinworths inhabited the same locality (used the same church, pubs, infirmaries, workhouses) in different decades, and this allows Riding to track social and environmental change (and the lack of it) between the 1840s boyhood of Tinworth and that of Chaplin in the 1890s/1900s. For example, when Chaplin’s feckless, alcoholic father (a vaudeville comedian) is finally compelled by the Poor Law guardians to provide for his son, their lodgings at 289 Kennington Road are a short walk from where Chartism ‘died’ on Kennington Common in April 1848 – Chartism has earlier been explored in relation to Tinworth’s youth. Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, had been committed to Cane Hill pauper lunatic asylum, the anxiety of battling chronic poverty and precarity contributing to her eventual total breakdown. Hannah’s emerges as perhaps the most moving, heroic life story in Hard Streets, in a crowded field. Performing from 16 as ‘That Charming Little Chanter, Lillie Harvey’, she eventually collapsed on stage and was never able again to earn decent money. Separated from her husband, with no financial help from him, and two children to care for, she would stitch 54 shirts a week on a borrowed Singer sewing machine for the wretched pay of six shillings and ninepence a week. Half-starved herself, she rescued from a Kennington pavement a verminous vagrant woman who was being tormented by schoolboys; she then recognised the woman as a former music hall friend, ‘The Dashing Eva Lester’, and much to her young son’s embarrassment and disgust, put her up in their garret.

Riding states that hers ‘is not a study in victimhood’, but ‘a story of suffering, survival and success against the odds’. The survival strategies provide many powerful vignettes: little George Tinworth employed as an errand boy for a firework manufacturer, carrying paper bags filled with gunpowder around London in his pockets; Chaplin’s father eating nothing except six raw eggs in port, gulping them down before rushing off to do a slapstick ‘turn’ on stage; teenage Tinworth having to break up each terracotta work he produced at art school after it had been assessed by the tutor, because he could not afford new clay for his next piece.

‘Who in society wanted to do something about the root cause of this precarious, pan-generational struggle?’ asks Riding as she moves on to consider the University Settlement movement, Oxbridge graduates’ cultural and social work outreach in slum areas. When meaningful improvements to working-class lives got underway in the early years of the 20th century, many of these had their roots in alliances forged between working-class radicals and middle-class campaigners. South London had a special role in this, as the location of the Browning Settlement, founded in Walworth in 1895, which explicitly linked the labour movement to social work outreach; the Women’s University Settlement in Southwark; and the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement in Kennington. Riding analyses the ambivalence that the settlement movement provoked (both at the time and in the rear-view mirror of history). Was this a patronising, top-down, ‘top-hatty philanthropy’ (as Toynbee Hall’s C.R. Ashbee called it)? Or could significant systemic change only have happened because of their input? Acknowledging the fashion for emphasising ‘agency’ in marginalised lives, Riding reveals that the Lambeth poor enjoyed music hall skits that lampooned the ‘middle-class do-gooders’, arguing that music hall was indeed an expression of working-class agency: laughing at their ‘betters’ gave ‘a heartfelt voice to their audience’s own lives’. Using primary and secondary sources, Riding plaits the local with the national, the personal with the political, to present a valuable resource about life on ‘the Surrey side’. Bleak and brutal, yes, but also studded with colour, energy, and joy.