Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) gets top billing in the subtitle of Hard Streets but he’s not the star of the show. The book begins with and is built around an earlier rags-to-riches tale and its wider purpose is to make us look closer at the rags and be less beguiled by the riches. 

George Tinworth (1843–1913) – of whom, the author admits, few people will have heard – was born and grew up in the same Walworth neighbourhood where Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, was born in 1865 and where Charlie himself entered the world. Desperate poverty characterised this part of London. This much we know; but, as leisure and education and perhaps inclination to record experience were lacking at the time, what we actually know amounts to very little. Chaplin’s late-life My Autobiography (1964) is a celebrated working-class memoir; Tinworth also sat down in his sixties to recall his early years. Vividly expressed, ungrammatical and poorly spelt, ‘The Life of G Tinworth: A London Boy that become Wheelwright and Sculptor’ remains unpublished.

Tinworth’s father was a wheelwright and George, as the eldest surviving son, went early into the business, such as it was. From boyhood he learned how to handle chisels; his mother taught him the rudiments of reading and writing through Bible stories. Around him, other children were working alongside older family members in similar small-scale, hand-to-mouth laborious trades. Costermongers, boot- and shoemakers, carters, needlewomen, laundresses, all made use of children. There were vanishingly few avenues offering escape into a different, less arduous, more comfortable life. Young Tinworth’s future would surely be mapped on his father’s trajectory: hopefulness, hard work, decency, disappointment, bitterness, alcoholism, early death. 

So too Charlie Chaplin, a half-century later, whose childhood lot was grim. With two sons to support and a husband who was sometimes present and more often not, Hannah entered the workhouse. Little Charlie and his elder half-brother, Syd, were intermittently fed, clothed and educated by the ratepayers of the parish. When father Charles was found and pressed into caring for his sons, it was actually his mistress, Louise, with a baby of her own and no less reason to resent Charles’s absences than Hannah, who sourly bore the burden of two extra mouths to feed. 

Charles was a comedian in the music halls, moderately successful, liable to be out of work or away on tour. Charlie was a gutter child, a ‘street arab’ in the language of the time: undersized, skinny, his bright eyes on the main chance as he roamed up and down between Kennington and New Cut, where market stalls overflowed with produce he had no money to buy and probably became adept at stealing. As well as writing about his early life after he became famous – well, not just famous but ‘the most famous man in the world’ – Chaplin also put his experiences into the films that brought him fame. The Kid (1921) is pure wish-fulfilment autobiography: it features an abandoned child and a man who rescues him, a mother who gave up the child to pursue her career in music hall (which is where Hannah had started) and who (unlike Hannah) becomes rich and successful and is pleased to be reunited with her son. The final frame shows the three entering an opulent house, the door closing behind them.

In real life the doors that closed behind Hannah were the same doors that had closed on her own mother and many other locals: the doors of the workhouse and the lunatic asylum. Tracing the case notes of Charlie’s maternal grandmother, Mary Ann Hill, in the St Saviour’s Union Lunatic Report Book, Jacqueline Riding finds entry after entry detailing misery and madness, a sequence of events that became ‘a recognisable pattern’ within Chaplin’s immediate family but was also ‘echoed among their neighbours’. Hard Streets is a salutary reminder of what the Labour Party was formed to address. Labouring people, even those who had maintained themselves adequately through a working life in ‘respectable’ trades, faced penury in sickness and old age. In 1892, Keir Hardie was elected as an independent MP and by 1900 working men who had been given the vote in 1867 and 1884 had a political party representing their interests with a progressive programme of social reform including old age pensions.

Tinworth’s mother was fortunate: she had sons able to support her, especially the devoted George, with whom she lived till her death. And George, like Charlie, escaped, although neither was unscarred. Hard Streets is also a reminder that poor people value arts and entertainment and seek beauty in their lives. It so happened that Lambeth was the centre of the entertainment industry; it was where agents and entrepreneurs had their offices before they moved to Covent Garden. Charlie joined a travelling troupe and was given training. He learned how to do mock-fighting (see, for fun, The Champion, 1915) and how to fall down stairs without hurting himself, as well as some musical skills. That he went on to write, direct, act in and compose the music for his early films is testimony not only to his brilliance but to this on-the-road training. He insisted he wasn’t drawn by ideas of art, only ‘livelihood’. Tinworth more or less accidentally found his way to the Lambeth School of Art, where in evening classes he excelled in modelling clay and chiselling stone. He had been carving and sculpting in secret ‘when me father was out’, as he put it. 

The hero of George’s story is John Sparkes, head of Lambeth School of Art, who was determined to help. Sparkes recommended him to the Royal Academy schools, then in Trafalgar Square. None of this was free: Lambeth School of Art cost four shillings a week – a huge percentage of the family income of barely thirty shillings a week. It had been kept a secret from Joshua whose alcoholism – ‘my father took to the drink and so went down and we with him’ – meant young George had to look after the wheelwright business too. The Royal Academy classes ran from 10am till 1pm each weekday. George was up early to make wheels for carters and costermongers, went home to breakfast, walked to Trafalgar Square for classes and walked back to work again, with or without his father. 

Sparkes, meanwhile, was busy making industrial connections: after all, what was the point of bringing art to the masses and teaching them arts and crafts skills if they couldn’t then get jobs? Nearby, among the many wharves on the south side of the river, were the Doulton company factories. Doulton’s weren’t interested in art: they made ‘useful’ ceramics such as sewage pipes, tiles and sanitary appliances. But Sparkes persuaded Henry Doulton to commission some terracotta decoration and from these small beginnings a flourishing set of artist’s studios developed. George, a prize-winning Royal Academy graduate, was taken on by Doulton’s, one of the first Lambeth-trained artists to be employed there. It meant a regular income, doing something he loved, security and advancement: ‘when I got home and told mother, we danced round the table with pleasure.’ 

George went on to become a noted figure, but some of his father’s bitterness, the feeling that his hard work wasn’t fully rewarded, troubled his later years. Even Charlie Chaplin, for all his fame, feared the effects of the past. It was ‘impossible’ for him to live in England because the poverty-stricken Lambeth streets ‘still had the power to trap me in the quick sands of their hopelessness’. He knew at first hand ‘the humiliation of the workhouse’ and ‘the stigma of the lunatic asylum’. Hannah was transferred from the workhouse infirmary to Cane Hill Asylum in 1898 and although she was later discharged it was only to be readmitted in 1903. Her mental health deteriorated. Her sons were able, eventually, to relocate her to California and provide full private care. George Tinworth, subject to depression, a confirmed teetotaller, reflected on his father’s drinking and was inclined towards forgiveness. The rage and violence, he wrote, came from injured pride, from impossible circumstances. 

In a short epilogue, Riding comes out as a local herself whose great-­grandfather died in the Lambeth workhouse. I also grew up locally, I know these streets and I read this deeply researched and valuable book with passionate identification. My paternal grandmother was admitted to Cane Hill Asylum thirty years after Hannah, in 1928. She died there. Her husband, a cobbler, was also a drinker and could be violent. My father, like George Tinworth, was forgiving in adulthood, understanding the terrible pressures on working people whose wages could never stretch to cover more than immediate needs and sometimes not even those. By the end of the 19th century middle-class philanthropists and social observers were flocking to Southwark and Lambeth to witness the woe, doing their best to rescue children and lamenting ‘the forlorn condition of the Aged Poor’, 84 per cent of whom were in receipt of indoor or outdoor relief. No one should underestimate the importance of the improvements that 20th-century welfare legislation introduced, or complacently assume they won’t be undone.