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 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.

"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

"Meticulously researched ... a fascinating collective portrait of the city in those times" - Financial Times

"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

"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

"Studded with colour, energy and joy ... Riding plaits the local with the national, the personal with the political" - History Today

"Powerful ... Bleak and brutal ... but also studded with colour, energy and joy" - History Today

"Praise for Hogarth: Wonderfully meandering and original" - Guardian

"Deft and richly detailed" - Sunday Times

"An excellent new biography" - 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" - The Gun, The Ship and the Pen