On Tuesday this week I attended a Q&A at NYU in London with Jacqueline Riding, historian and historical advisor to film and TV (including Mike Leigh’s period dramas Peterloo and Mr. Turner). Her new book, Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London, is an engaging, accessible read, and Jacqueline talks about accessibly and with humour. I was particularly struck by the way she traces the origins of the Music Hall sketch performance tradition – that Chaplin was raised in – to the way young children would hang around outside Victorian pubs watching the adults misbehave. So many of the types that populate his films and the aspects of physical performance would have been modelled on the drunken punters.
In order to cover the full throw of the Victorian era, Riding moves beyond Chaplin to examine the life of Lambeth ceramicist George Tinworth (1843-1913), neighbour of Chaplin’s mother, and the kind of working-class arts practitioner who – along with the Music Hall entertainers like Charles Chaplin snr. – would have inspired the at-times penniless young Chaplin, and pointed the way to a less hardscrabble, chaotic existence. The book isn’t just about
The book has been warmly reviewed in places like History Today and is available from your local bookshop, or from the bookshop.org website.
