Hard Streets
Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Profile Books Ltd
Publishing:5th Feb '26
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 5th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the author of Hogarth and Peterloo
'HARD STREETS is a rich and emotive study of a world now lost that will leave readers stunned' Hallie Rubenhold, author of THE FIVE Charlie Chaplin rose from the hard streets of Edwardian London to worldwide fame. But his work and outlook were always shaped by the world he came from, a place of cheap entertainments and the threat of the workhouse, radical politics and desperate poverty. Framed through the life of this iconic success story, acclaimed historian Jacqueline Riding reveals working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Breathing life into forgotten stories of mothers and sons, labourers and actors, vagrants and sex workers, of suffering, survival and success against the odds, this compelling social history paints a striking portrait of a vanished city.
Remarkable in scope and detail, this impressive evocation of the tough world that produced Chaplin is fascinating and often profoundly moving -- Mike Leigh
An enthralling journey through some of London's hardest streets, in the company of a writer of integrity and passion -- Lucy Worsley
A compelling and richly detailed portrait of working-class life in a neglected corner of London -- Alwyn Turner, author of A SHELLSHOCKED NATION
Through her painstaking research, Jacqueline Riding has reconstructed a thoroughly engrossing and visceral picture of 'how the other half lived' in Victorian London. The dirty, vibrant streets of Charlie Chaplin's childhood, the struggles of its inhabitants caught in the twisted web of work and poverty, addiction and temperance, violence and family life are sketched in uncomfortably vivid detail. Hard Streets is a rich and emotive study of a world now lost that will leave readers stunned -- Hallie Rubenhold, author of THE FIVE
Praise for Hogarth: Wonderfully meandering and original * Guardian *
Deft and richly detailed * Sunday Times *
An excellent new biography -- Kathryn Hughes * Daily Mail *
Marvellous and timely ... Jacqueline Riding makes sensitive and imaginative use of a wide range of often difficult and neglected sources ... a vivid and compelling reconstruction -- Linda Colley, author * The Gun, The Ship and the Pen *
ISBN: 9781800818644
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
432 pages
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