HARD STREETS : WORKING-CLASS LIVES IN CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S LONDON

By Jacqueline Riding
Profile Books. 419 pages. £25. ISBN 9781-80081-864-4

Reviewed by Jim Burns

“Seeking out details of the lives of individual members of the poorer working class, even those as famous as Charlie Chaplin, requires detective work”. So says Jacqueline Riding in her study of the conditions in which many people lived in the period between, roughly, 1850 and 1914. But let me point out that she hasn’t produced a wide-ranging survey, complete with statistics and graphs, though she does call on such material when required. Instead, she has chosen to look closely at two individuals whose lives can be followed to some extent, partly because they left written records of their activities and because other people remembered them and  wrote about them. There are lines in Idris Davies’s The Angry Summer: A Poem of 1926, which talk of “those who toil without a name/And pass into the night”, and they perhaps sum up how history has dealt with most working-class lives. History has been kinder with George Tinworth and Charlie Chaplin.

Many people will immediately recognise Chaplin’s name, but I doubt that the same can be said of George Tinworth. He was born in Walworth, South London, described as “one of the most densely inhabited and poorest districts in the entire metropolis”, in 1843.  His father was a wheelwright, and his mother in between having children, several of whom died (Tinworth recalled his mother telling him, “she could not get her first three boys to live”), likely picked up whatever part-time work was available, including taking in washing. From Riding’s account, she was supportive of Tinworth’s ambitions to become an artist and especially a sculptor, despite having to assist his father in his workshop from an early age. His father was less inclined to encourage him.

I’m moving quickly through Tinworth’s life out of necessity. The family could have lived in a moderately comfortable way had it not been for his father’s drinking, which affected his business and led to friction in the home. However, Tinworth’s determination to succeed as an artist did gain him access to the Lambeth School of Art in 1861. And, in 1864, he was admitted to the Royal Academy School as a probationer.  His sculpture, “Peace and Wrath in Low Life”, was exhibited at the 1866 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and attracted some attention because of what Edmund Gosse referred to as its “peculiar realism”. It showed two “street arabs” fighting, with two little girls and a dog hovering around them, and was clearly an urban scene taken from Tinworth’s experiences of life in the slums. Riding provides information about some of the gangs that roamed the streets, including the Hooligan Boys, and the all-female Forty Thieves.

It was obvious that Tinworth needed some form of regular income while he attempted to make a name for himself in what was a competitive and class-based art world. Helped by John Sparkes, the head of Lambeth School of Art, he obtained employment at Henry Doulton’s factory, where he was to stay until his death in 1913. Prior to Tinworth’s arrival at Doulton’s, the firm, which had mainly been known for producing functional objects such as drainpipes, was soon under Tinworth’s guidance manufacturing vases, jugs, decorative tiles, humorous figures, and other objects. But he continued to create works such as a terracotta fountain for Kensington Park, the designs for an altar piece, pulpit and font for a church in Copenhagen, and a terracotta relief for St Bede’s College, Manchester, along with material for York Minster and Truro Cathedral.

It’s difficult to know how Tinworth felt about never being able to rely solely on his own work for his livelihood, and having to remain in what would generally be seen as a commercial environment. It certainly gave him the opportunity to live in better circumstances and he moved to Kew with his wife. It’s suggested that he suffered from bouts of depression, which may have been because of the frustration he felt at what he thought of as his failure to produce sufficient significant work acknowledged by critics and a wide public

I doubt that too many people, a few specialists and local historians apart, will have heard of George Tinworth. It interests me that he doesn’t appear to have been involved with the Arts and Craft Movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, though a lot of his work, at least what I’ve seen of it, does stand comparison with what some of William Morris’s associates were doing. There is only one passing reference to Morris in Hard Streets. I wonder if Tinworth knew him, or knew about him? Morris was a socialist, of course, and had a political as well as an artistic agenda to promote. Tinworth may have had strong class feelings, but was not, as far as I can tell, involved in any kind of radical politics. There is an anecdote about him in conversation with the Duke of Bedford, who said that a terracotta relief of the Prodigal Son had made him look too old. Tinworth’s response was that “it tends to make a man look old if he hasn’t a halfpenny in his pocket”, to which the Duke responded, “So it do, so it do”. Tinworth’s unspoken thought was, ”what do you know about it”.

If Tinworth is someone relatively obscure and now mostly forgotten, the same can never be said of Charlie Chaplin. His films still crop up regularly at festivals and on TV, and the character he created of the funny little man with a bowler hat and an odd way of walking is known world-wide. And yet there is a relationship of sorts with Tinworth. Chaplin was also born in Walworth, albeit forty-six years after him. But he grew up just as much affected by poverty, the life of the mean streets, and broken domestic circumstances, as Tinworth was.

Chaplin’s family was theatrical.  When he was born in 1889 his father was well-known in the music-halls, then a prominent feature of working-class life.  His mother, Hannah, was also a music-hall performer under the name of Lillie Harley. But Chaplin’s parents separated in 1890, so he grew up not knowing his father until some time later.  And his mother’s career came to an end when she collapsed on stage one night and never regained her singing voice.  She turned to religion for support. Chaplin, much later, said that his mother “gave the most appealing interpretation of Christ that I have ever heard or seen,” and “she illuminated to me the kindliest light this world has ever known, which has endowed literature and the theatre with their greatest and richest themes: love, pity and humanity”.

I’m having to move at a fast pace from one episode of Chaplin’s life to another, but it’s worth mentioning that, as an indication of their impoverished situation, Hannah and her two sons, Charlie and Syd, spent time in Newington Workhouse, and that Charlie was sent to the pauper schools at Hanwell. As Riding points out, going into the workhouse was a last resort, and one of the great fears of working-class life. For the poverty-stricken elderly it was particularly looked on as almost akin to a death sentence and as a desperate and degrading end to life.

It was inevitable that Chaplin would, at some stage, become a music hall artist of one kind or another, and “By 16 December 1898 he was performing with the Eight Lancashire Lads, a clog-dancing troupe founded and run by William Jackson, an acquaintance of Charles Chaplin senior”.  It’s not easy to assess what his physical condition would have been at the time, though he was said to have amounted to “scarcely more than a London street waif, begging for a living, sleeping heaven knows where, and just barely keeping body and soul together”.  As an indication of what social and economic circumstances were like in working-class areas, Riding asserts that, when the Boer War broke out in 1899, “half the working men who attempted to enlist were rejected because of poor health and weak overall physical condition”. This at a time when, as Jack London pointed out in his 1903 book, The People of the Abyss, London was the greatest city in the greatest empire the world had ever known.

By 1903 Chaplin still hadn’t managed to establish any kind of regular employment, either on the stage or in general. He worked as a delivery boy, a glass blower, and a shop boy, and tried selling old clothes at a local street market, only to be laughed at by passers-by. His father died, and his mother was increasingly showing signs of mental instability. Chaplin’s luck began to change when he had a small part in the play Sherlock Holmes in the West End, followed by a stint with Wal Pink’s company, after which he moved to Casey’s Circus.  His real entry into show business came in 1908 when he joined Fred Karno’s company, becoming a regular visitor to the Fun Factory, touring to Paris and elsewhere. Karno’s was the “outstanding company” of its kind, “rotating a large repertoire of comedies”, performed in a style that Chaplin, looking back, described as “cruel and boisterous, filled with acrobatic humour and low, knockabout comedy”.

Chaplin sailed to America in October 1911 with the Karno company, something he had wanted to do since a previous tour. He had felt more comfortable in the United States, resenting the “ever-present class tabulating” in Britain. Riding comments, when referring to a particular incident of class snobbery, ”Charlie sensed, like George Tinworth before him, that he now fell between two stools: at his very lowest ebb, as described by his son, he had been mocked by his poor working-class fellows for being even poorer than they were, and now he was being mocked by a man of privilege, simply for enjoying the spoils of working-class prosperity”. It was in America that he established the figure of the little tramp and his encounters with authority and the pompous, and quickly struck up a relationship with a wide international audience which recognised where his sympathies lay, no matter how successful and prosperous he himself became. In time, needless to say, the powerful and privileged found a way to strike back at his mockery. That’s another story.

I feel that I may not have done justice to Hard Streets because I’ve focused on the basic facts of the lives of George Tinworth and Charlie Chaplin but unfortunately had to leave out much of what is additionally fascinating about Riding’s book. She does more than fill in the background to their activities, and presents what is an informative social commentary that takes in the changing political scene of the late-Victorian and early-Edwardian periods. It was a turbulent time of social and political ferment, with the rise of the new unions and socialist political consciousness, the early stirrings of agitation to widen universal suffrage for women and many working-class men, and plans for a system of old-age pensions. I was especially interested in Riding’s account of the settlement movement, with social workers, teachers and many others moving into working-class areas and developing programmes to improve living conditions, educational standards, general health, and much more.

Hard Streets is a book well worth reading. It never fails to hold the attention, and it can be moving when it points to conditions in the workhouses and asylums that so many of the poor found themselves sent to.  Riding’s account includes numerous examples of the precarious nature of working-class lives, and how families found ways to survive. What is  obvious is that the women were, more often than not, the ones who held things together.