'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 Victorian London to become one of the most beloved comedians of all time. With his threadbare jacket, baggy trousers and puzzled expression, Chaplin's 'Little Tramp' alter ego was shaped by the city of his childhood - a place of ribald variety shows and hard drinking, radical politics and desperate poverty. In Hard Streets, Jacqueline Riding conjures the lost world of working-class London in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Weaving through Chaplin's iconic rags-to-riches story are the lives of music hall stars, political reformers and George Tinworth, a neighbour of Chaplin's mother and grandparents, who progressed from poor wheelwright to nationally renowned sculptor. Riding paints a striking portrait of a time and place where hardship was the norm, but where talent, determination and luck could bring opportunity and success.

Remarkable in scope and detail, this impressive evocation of the tough world that produced Chaplin is fascinating and often profoundly moving -- Mike Leigh
Powerful ... a vivid picture of working-class life in the capital in the 19th and early 20th centuries ... yet Riding also reveals bright spots in the gloom * The Times *
A deeply researched and valuable book * Literary Review *
Meticulously researched ... a fascinating collective portrait of the city in those times * Financial Times *
Fascinating * Country Life *
An enthralling journey through some of London's hardest streets, in the company of a writer of integrity and passion -- Lucy Worsley
A clear-and, crucially, clear-eyed-picture of those left behind, or run over, by the upheavals of empire, industry and science around the turn of the 20th century * Prospect *
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
Part social history, part micro-biography and entirely compelling ... Few historians have captured so well the texture of London's poor without condescension or gloom ... There is something almost Chaplinesque in Riding's ability to blend tragedy and laughter, scholarship and sentiment, grime and grace * BBC History Magazine *
A compelling and richly detailed portrait of working-class life in a neglected corner of London -- Alwyn Turner, author of A SHELLSHOCKED NATION
'Powerful ... Bleak and brutal ... but also studded with colour, energy and joy ... Riding plaits the local with the national, the personal with the political -- Sarah Wise * History Today *

Dr Jacqueline Riding is a historian and art historian specialising in British history and eighteenth century art. Former curator of the Palace of Westminster and Director of the Handel House Museum, her previous book Hogarth: A Life in Progress was a Sunday Times and Christie's Art Book of the Year.