Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Jacqueline Riding, "Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London" (Profile Books, 2025)
Description: Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile, 2026) by Dr. Jacqueline Riding.
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 twen...