From the streets of Edwardian London rose a Hollywood star: Charlie Chaplin. But even at the peak of global fame, his work and outlook were still shaped by the world he came from, a place of cheap entertainments and the threat of the workhouse, radical politics and desperate poverty.
Hard Streets is a portrait of working-class London at the turn of the twentieth century, framed through the life of its most iconic success story. Acclaimed historian Jacqueline Riding brings to life the voices of those written out of history – mothers and sons, workers and actors, vagrants and sex workers – to paint a striking portrait of a nearly-vanished London.
A story of suffering, survival and success against the odds, Hard Streets also reveals how Chaplin’s London became the incubator for a movement to address the causes of poverty – one which would ultimately change, for the better, the future of every British citizen.