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- [00:01]
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- [00:33]
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- [00:39]
Charlotte Vosper
Mom talk has just been blowing up.
- [00:40]
Interviewer/Host
Whitney and Jen are on Dancing with the Stars. Taylor is a bachelorette. Saying that out loud is crazy. Like that is huge. But all the cool opportunities could pull us apart. It's causing issues in everyone's marriage.
- [00:51]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
My whole world is falling apart right now.
- [00:54]
Charlotte Vosper
It's chaos.
- [00:55]
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- [01:35]
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- [02:05]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
What was life like for London's poor working classes in the 19th century? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Jacqueline Riding chronicles the ways in which their days were marked by poverty and tragedy, but also studded with moments of joy. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Jacqueline highlights the stories of many little known individuals alongside that of one person whose name will definitely, definitely be familiar. Charlie Chaplin.
- [02:33]
Interviewer/Host
I'd like to start with a bit of scene setting. Your book Hard street is about the working class people who lived in southeast London during the 19th century. What was life like for working Class people at this time?
- [02:44]
Charlotte Vosper
Well, because the book spans the whole of the 19th century and goes into the 20th. It is, as ever in history, a period of great change and shift. And the working class, who might have started ancestrally in the home counties around London over the 19th century, are increasingly moving from agriculture and the land and rural areas into London itself. And this is the Cross London. But the great thing about focusing on a particular area of, you know, a couple of square miles of south London is that you can zoom in, you can see the bigger picture, which is that there's this mass migration from the land, from counties around London into London. You can see the shift between what was in South London at the beginning of the 19th century, a semi rural environment, very little building work or housing or anything significant in South London, everything's north of the river. But over the 19th century you see this shift from these small little villages, almost like Camberwell, would you believe, Walworth and so on, sort of expanding into much bigger areas, populations and then effectively knitting together, becoming this massive area of domestic residences for predominant middle class. But a sizable chunk of that population is working class. And that sort of is the history of London and the United Kingdom is this shift from the land into the cities. So that's the bigger picture. But if you're then zooming into this square two miles in south London, you can start sort of zooming into the individual experiences of people. And I think that helps to personalise it so that we can see as individuals ourselves, that our ancestors and the people that we're reading about are real people experiencing things on the ground. On the ground. I use two particular individuals who started off incredibly poor and it's the poor working class that I'm really focusing on here, as defined by James Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the Labour Party in the late 19th century. I'm really sort of focusing on that as opposed to the working class who were the clerks who lived in South London and then journeyed to the city to work in the various businesses and institutions in the city, say, or in the West End. These are the people who are more hand to mouth, who are more vulnerable to the vagaries of economics, the bigger meta economics impacts them on the ground perhaps in a greater way, but also the fact that even if we call them the poor working class and almost treat them as if they're a big group of individuals, in fact their strata, you know, there are grades of poverty, there's grades of income for working class and people did move around, they moved up and down. So the experience can be quite shifting. It could be completely on the bread line, on the poverty line, or you could experience a moment of success or greater income and you would then move up. So it's a simple question, but it's quite a complicated answer. But I think in focusing on this little bit of South London, you can start to get through in a more granular way. You can start to see what the actual effects of warfare, the sort of the broader political issues, behaviour of the people who are actually in charge running the country, and how this might then impact on the poor working class at what we would deem the bottom of society.
- [06:25]
Interviewer/Host
And in this shifting world of 19th and into 20th century southeast London, whose lives do you focus on? In the book you mentioned two individuals there and a wider group of people. So whose stories you telling?
- [06:36]
Charlotte Vosper
Well, the book is framed by these two autobiographies. The first autobiography, which really covers most of the first half of the book, but then crosses over with the second half of the book. This is an autobiography which is a manuscript at Southwark Archives, written by George Timworth, who is one of these poor working class Britons. He starts life as a wheelwright and then through the various opportunities that are offered to him from a government level, but also within his own communities, he aspires to be an artist. And so it's his journey from poor wheelwright, not knowing where the next meal is going to come from, through to being successful as a sculptor and ultimately as the master modeller for Dalton's pottery, Lambeth pottery. So he's the first half of the story and then the second half which crosses over is the autobiography, which is one of the most famous autobiographies by somebody starts in the poor working classes from London. It's Charlie Chaplin. So Charlie Chaplin, I suppose, is the major hook into the bigger picture, the bigger story about the area in which he was born and brought up and the people who were his family, his friends, associates, colleagues in music hall, obviously, which he moves into. So these are the two autobiographies which conveniently actually span the whole of the Victorian era and the Edwardian era. And between them, they actually start to show you where the opportunities might lie. You can't read a book, it seems to me, that is consistently miserable. Both of them, because they are ultimately successful, they become significant figures in their own spheres. You know, you've got the uptick, you've got the success story, but it's how they get there as two individuals which is, I think, really interesting and informative. Who are they? Who's with them? Who are their relatives, who are their neighbours, who might offer a more usual experience of living and working and surviving in this particular square, two miles of south London. So these two guys are extraordinary, but most people were ordinary, but actually a lot of them might not have considered themselves to be down at heel. They probably might have enjoyed their lives. It was tough, it was hard, but there was joy and there was beauty and there was moments of laughter, which, of course, Charlie Chaplin absolutely taps into. You've got these two guys who are shinning up the pole of society, but never lose track or sight of where they come from and who they are.
- [09:20]
Interviewer/Host
Something I'd just like to draw on a little bit that you mentioned. There is this idea about accessing, quote, unquote, ordinary people's lives through the lens of such unusual people as Charlie Chaplin and George Tynworth, who went on to have, you know, hugely successful careers. Can their remarkable stories offer us a representative window into the lives of, I suppose, otherwise unremarkable people?
- [09:43]
Charlotte Vosper
Yes, the terminology is always quite difficult because actually, most of us are not that remarkable. I mean, this is not in any sense a value judgment on the 19th century, because, as I say in the book me, my ancestors are ordinary folk. You know, they lived ordinary lives in this country. So with Chaplin and Tymworth, we know something about them because they're famous or they became well known. They register in the accounts of what happens to them. You know, they register that they're in the newspapers. You can see them more so perhaps, than the vast majority of their fellow poor working class from the areas they come from. But it still requires some investigation, just trying to sort out what happened to them when they were living those lives of difficulty in the first 20 years of their lives, let's say. But what's great about them being famous? And you can spot them in the archives and in the databases. Although be careful, there is more than one Charlie Chaplin living in London. I don't just mean his own relatives. There are completely random Charlie Chaplins. So you have to be quite discerning about which Charlie Chaplin you're looking at. Suddenly he'll pop up in Yorkshire and you go, why is he there? And, of course, it's completely different Charlie Chaplin, but they pop up more, they register more within. Within those sorts of archives that you use for these sort of family histories. But what's great is you can also see Charlie Chaplin's mum, his mother Hannah, at the head of the household in a particular street, in a particular moment. In his life. You can see the list, how old he was, what they were doing in the census records. You can also see who else is living in the same building. You can see who's living next door. And so the fame of these two individuals opens up a whole world of people who would ordinarily not register at all. So the archives are there, the information's there. We've just got to start looking for them. And it might not be huge, but it's something
- [11:39]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
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- [12:28]
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- [13:28]
Interviewer/Host
I want to talk a little bit more about the experiences of people who lived in Southeast London in the 19th century and into the 20th. So George Timworth, Charlie Chaplin and the ordinary people around them all lived in buildings along the Lambeth and Woolworth streets. In the title of your book you describe these as hard streets. In what way were they hard? Where does that notion of hard streets come from and what does it tell us about their lives?
- [13:54]
Charlotte Vosper
The book actually Opens with Charlie Chaplin making a broadcast from America, where he'd been living for decades, to Great Britain, back to his country of his origins, and very particularly to London and Lambeth. And he describes the streets of Lambeth. And in this broadcast, he describes the streets of Lambeth as the hard streets. He actually says, I remember the Lambeth streets, the New Cut and the Lambeth Walk, Vauxhall Road. They were hard streets. And one couldn't say they were paved with gold. Nevertheless, the people are made of pretty good methods. And the thing about Charlie Chaplin is he's so absolutely quotable. His autobiography is one of the most beautifully written autobiographies I think I've ever read. So I took that idea of the hard streets weren't paved with gold, but the people were of good metal, and said, right, hard streets. These are the hard streets of Lambeth and Southwark. And let's get into the streets and see how tough and hard they are. And of course, they are hard. They are tough. They're dirty. The early period of Tymworth is, of course, the period when they're just starting to think about introducing new sewage systems, because the Thames is just one big morass of smells and dead bodies and all sorts of things. So you start off in a period where even the streets are full of dirt and soil and all sorts of stuff. And then you're increasingly moving towards this idea of sanitizing the hard streets, as it were. So that's the environment in which they're living. And I like using the physical space that people are moving around. I like describing things from that starting point. What does the street look like? What sort of housing are they living in? Beginning of the century, they're living in cottages, which was associated with the working and laboring class, both rural and urban. By the end of the century, they're living in. What are the starting point for high rise blocks? These sort of mass, sort of apartment flats, en blocs, which have a bit of space around them, bit of greenery around them. And that's the shift from this idea of an independent cottage with a bit of land that you might be able to grow some vegetables through the century. You're suddenly in these high rise areas. Of course, we're not talking blocks of 60 floors or anything like that, but we are talking 10 floors, eight floors, big for the period. So that's the shift. That's the sort of environment, the physical environment in which people are living. But I also wanted to reflect the elements of beauty, which Chaplin certainly writes about, those natural elements of beauty, like trees and flowers. It might be a sort of nostalgic memory of the place where he was born and grew up. But those memories stuck and those ideas of lilac trees and flowers and things were also there. So in amongst the grime and the gloom and the hardness of the streets, the hardness is broken up with these little moments of beauty, which a lot of times is natural beauty. It is about somebody having a flower pot on their windowsill in the street. Just those little snatches of colour and delight that people did bring into their lives, no matter how tough and hard it was. Both Chaplin and Timworth talk about beauty a lot. They talk about this idea of creating joy and beauty and humour with the tragedy. All that is part and parcel of it. And it might be that some people simply didn't know they were living hard lives. It was just what life was like. You just got on with it, you made the best of it and you potted up a geranium, stuck it in your window box, and every time you walked past it, it brought a bit of delight and joy into your life.
- [17:34]
Interviewer/Host
So then these hard streets meant a pretty tough existence, coupled with these glimmers of joy and hope. For many poor working class people in the 19th century, including George Timworth and Charlie Chaplin, can you tell us a little bit more about their early lives? What was Tim Wirth and Chaplin's experiences like?
- [17:52]
Charlotte Vosper
Well, both of them, they were in the poor working class, so they are in the lower strata. Therefore they're in a strata that education which is increasingly becoming organized through national level. Increasingly, the poor working class were the people who just couldn't quite get captured for basic education. So both of them reveal the difficulties of the poor working class accessing even the basic education that was on offer. Of course, it wasn't free either. You still had to pay for this education. But it's also the difficulty of actually freeing up time for children to be educated, because so many of the kids were actually incredibly vital aspects of the household's economy that they were bringing money in. Very few of the poor working class and perhaps even the layer above that could survive on one man's wages. Women tended to work as well. They brought work into the household. This is the thing when you look at the census, so the people who were living around George Teignworth, in the various streets that he and his family were living in, so many of them were laundresses. So that's the difficulty for the two of them, despite the fact they spanned the 19th century, before and after the 1870 Education act, which technically introduced eventually mandatory junior education for children, which would have been reading, writing, basically Timworth, his literacy was good, but not brilliant and he seems to have learnt from home for do his mother and that was really important. How literate was the mother, whether the children, certainly in the first half of the 19th century, would end up in any sense literate would be dependent on the mother. Second half of the century, after the 1870s, certainly you would expect a child like Charlie chaplin, born in 1889, to have some basic education. But he, for example, says that when he was first given the theatre script when he was 11, he could barely read it. So that's an example just through that one person that shows you how these, these children were falling through the net. And of course with education comes opportunity. Through education you can start to think about doing something different. You might have been born as a wheelwright, as George Teignworth was, into a wheelwrights family. But it's only if you can to an extent read and write, or at least, you know, be able to read to a vast degree that you might even start to consider attending an art school, for example, which is what Timworth does, and then eventually attends the Royal Academy schools, which is amazing. But when you think of where he came from, that lack of education was definitely a barrier to him doing this, to trying to get there, and therefore would have been a barrier for others living within the same element of society as him. So, you know, the two of them are fascinating in that sense because they show you that the difficulties of the poor working class actually even attaining the basic opportunities that are on offer, particularly in regard to education, as you say.
- [20:49]
Interviewer/Host
I think both Timworth and Chaplin, the early experiences sound incredibly tough and marked with difficulty and we see them overcoming these barriers to our listeners. If you'd like to find out a bit more about Charlie Chaplin's later life, we've actually got a brilliant article about this which you can find on our website or app map. It's about Chaplin's return to London at the end of the First World War and it's called welcome Home, Chaplin's Post War Return to London. And it's by Rob Baker. I'll put the link to the article in the description of this episode. So if that's something which you're interested in, definitely go and check that out. But back to hard streets. As you've mentioned, Jacqueline, we should understand Timworth and Chaplin's experiences of poverty, instability and difficulty as representative or as a window into poor working class lives in 19th century Lambeth and Woolworth, but of course they were both men. Do you think that working class women's experiences were different?
- [21:43]
Charlotte Vosper
Well, yes, because the women were to a vast degree, the chattels of their husbands. I mean, the husbands dominated the household. The husbands were expected to go out and work, but as I said before, most poor working class households couldn't survive on one man's income, which was shillings. So the women also needed to work or to bring in work. Going out to work was frowned upon. So women tended to do the work, particularly if they're married and got kids, that they would do the work within the house, within the home. So they are, you know, juggling, looking after their man who's the main breadwinner, as he would be perceived. He's going out to work, they are bringing in work to supplement his wages whilst trying to juggle the children, whether it be just looking after the kids or educating them if they couldn't afford for them to go to school. So the woman's work was never over. And it seems to me when the husbands come back, they might take their boots off and sit in front of the fire or something and be fed, whereas the wife was still working. I mean, she was still managing the household, managing the kids, etc, etc. So even if you were relatively well off, you know, in so far that you had two incomes, let's say, and you didn't need your kids to work even then, the work that women had to do was extraordinary. I mean, it really was, it was graphed from sunrise to sunset, it seems to me, and it was just relentless. And of course, in this period, we also have to remember that until the welfare state after the Second World War, a lot of these families, if they really fell on hard times, would have been reliant on the poor law unions who would offer you indoor outdoor relief. And the indoor relief was the workhouse. No one in the working class wanted to end up in the workhouse. It was dreaded, it was the absolute last resort and it was seen as shameful that you would end up in the workhouse. So you can imagine men were obviously fighting hard not to have to end up being reliant on poor relief. But the pressure on the women, as I say, must have been hard.
- [23:47]
Interviewer/Host
Absolutely. And clearly in the case of women and also poor working class men and children, we are talking about experiences of real hardship here, I think in that there might be a tendency to view these historical figures as victims. How do you think we should understand their experiences?
- [24:05]
Charlotte Vosper
I suppose we should look on what the circumstances are in which they're trying to survive, trying to live, you know, a relatively happy and secure and peaceful life. I suppose they are victims of circumstances, of environments, of great men's activity. We are now, aren't we to an extent feel powerless. In the bigger picture, politics, climate change, etc, etc, we can feel powerless. I just didn't want them to be branded victims, if you see what I mean. The environment in which they're living in is hard. There isn't a lot that's being offered to people to help them, even just tide them over, certainly not on a regular basis to help them. You can presume that they can often feel a little bit isolated. There's also pressures, particularly on the women, to maintain what look like households are clean, tidy, well maintained. Children that go out onto the streets looking, you know, clean, tidy, well maintained. The pressures are there. So people are struggling. They're trying to do their bit, they're trying to do it on their own or within a community, within their street or within the neighborhood and so on. These are not people who select this as a lifestyle choice, nor are they victims as such. They're buffeted to and fro by the bigger politics, the bigger stuff that's going on. And at times just simply surviving and putting bread and water on the table must have felt relentless. And that's certainly the experience of George Teignworth. He actually describes in the 1850s where he said he simply didn't know where the next meal would be coming from. It wasn't helped by the fact that in order to, one suspects, to relieve the relentlessness of his own life, that his father Joshua was a relentless drinker, that in order to, I guess, self anesthesise from his life and his disappointments, that he would be regularly seen in pubs drinking and then would go home and behind that closed front door, all sorts of strange and terrible things no doubt are happening, including physical abuse, certainly of his mother, that there might have been some domestic violence. And this is the hardness of it, you know, the difficulties of people's lives and how they as individuals choose to respond to it. And some people, including his father, chose to respond by getting drunk. That's money. That's not going to the food to put on the Timworth table for the children to eat or to clothe them or to pay for the rent. His early part of his memoir is just this relentless moving around from lodging house to lodging house to smaller and smaller accommodation, presumably because the father was drinking away a lot of the income for the house. Understandable. And sad as that might be, but it meant that the family was becoming increasingly, increasingly pinched. But what was so sad about it, sort of heartening, but also sad, is that he clearly still loved his father, I think, despite everything. In his memoir, he says that he missed his father when he died. He loved his father and that he knew that in different circumstances his father would have been more successful or at least be able to feel a sense of pride in his own life, in his own family. He's described by one of Teemworth's biographers as almost like a jarring note. It was this relentless note of fear and intimidation that existed within the family. But despite all that, when he's in his 70s and writing his memoir, he does, he speaks with great sympathy and affection for his father. So, again, that's the sort of tragedy, but also the hope, the human hope over experience, as it were. It is important to. The flip side to these hard streets is that there were entertainments that were put on free of charge, which people tapped into very readily. So you had things like the wonderful Campbelwell Fair, which was an annual fair held in the summer on Campbelwell Green. And it was just a riot and people turned up and they enjoyed it. There were streets, street theatre, there were political street theatre. You know, you had people standing on their soapboxes in the middle of Kennington, what became Kennington Common, and that's where they had hustings for politics. You could turn up and that would be a form of entertainment to see what's going on in what people are saying in politics. And then you get the great parades, for example, the sort of political parades like the Chartist Parade in April 1848, from central London to Kennington Park. You know, that's entertainment. All of it is street theatre. And Timworth talks a lot about this street theatre of the Maeve celebrations, the misrule that goes on as a result of some of this folk culture that's all playing out in the streets. So you've got to balance, constantly balance this hardship with these moments where Jane Tymworth would put her bonnet on, a little straw hat on, grab her eldest son and off they'd go to the Campbellwell Fair and enjoy watching the goings on, the kind of ribaldry that goes on there. So, yeah, we have to constantly maintain this sort of balance, like you say.
- [29:17]
Interviewer/Host
I think balancing this complicated mix of family values, potentially relentless poverty, you know, love and tragedy and hardship, balancing that sense of theater and joy in the same space is a really empowering way to view this history in these people's lives. So why do you think it is important to tell a people's history? What does this mean for us in the modern day?
- [29:41]
Charlotte Vosper
So this has been a learning curve for me too, and delving into this idea of family, local history and really get into the idea of using census records and so on. It does allow you to focus in on individuals. They suddenly become real people moving around an urban environment, trying to make a life for themselves and to live and love, you know, and die in this space as well as they could possibly do so. So the research through things like the Chaplin archive, for example, using him as an entrance way into this, other lives around him, Just a simple example is the records from July 1895, when his mother Hannah, and his half brother Sid, first enter the Lambeth Workhouse. This sort of admissions entry, there's a copy of it at the Charlie Chaplin archive, which is the family archive. So you can see what happens to the famous man's mother and his half brother. But I started looking either side of that entry to see who else was walking into the Lambeth Workhouse on the same day or around the same time. And the entry above Hannah Chaplin and Sid Chaplin is somebody called Rosina Wright. And you can see sort of basic details about why she's there. Where has she been, where was she living? She enters the workhouse with her young newborn infant, Samuel. But it's noted in this record that Samuel dies soon after entering the workhouse. And that just opens up a different history which has been somewhat lost. But just that one entry just sitting above the famous man's mum and half brother. If you start to then delve into that, then you might be able to discover a life that has been lost and you can in some way recover it. I think it is important because she was someone's mother, she was someone's child. These are all people you know, it's us. This is what the book is about. It's about us, people like us. And the thing that particularly makes Rosina's situation stand out, because she is not unusual in this period at all, a woman with a young infant entering the workhouse, is the mention that her husband, as she describes him, had taken his own life. And that's why she's there. That's the reason for her going to the workhouse, because she's now a poor person and she has no income. The minute you've got tragedy of somebody having taken their own life means that there's the potential for that event, that circumstance to appear in the local press. And that's exactly how I discovered that in fact, Rosina Wright was not married to this, this man she describes as her husband, Charles. He was in fact married to somebody else. She may well have been married to somebody else as well. And all that, the circumstances around his tragic death and her entering the workhouse on the same day or around the same time as Hannah Chaplin and Sid Chaplin suddenly opens up and you can at least try and find out what happened to Resina through the census records, the poor law records and all that kind of thing. More often than not, you draw a blank. Anyone who's done any of this will know what I'm talking about. You draw blanks, but you can kind of intelligently use the data you discover and then at least, you can at least suggest what's happened to her. And I'll leave the people listening to this podcast to hopefully buy the book and then find out what happens to Rosina.
- [32:59]
Interviewer/Host
Something that I wanted just to pull out a little bit more to round off our chat today is this idea that when you are looking at this history, you find an urban space and lots of historical figures come to life within that historical space. I think there's a connection between the 19th century Hard streets of southeast London and the working class everyman or ordinary person who lives on them. What do you think that relationship between people and space is in this history?
- [33:25]
Charlotte Vosper
Well, I think the space allows for a kind of burrowing in it gives you parameters. I was learning on the job here, you know, I was no expert on Walworth or Lambeth. I live in this area. I live in Charlie Chaplin's London. I knew something about it. I knew about the charters meeting, all the big stuff, but, you know, I didn't know about this granular stuff. So I think if you restrict the place, it means the microscope is zooming in on a particular area. And as I say, you can then start to sort of chivy out, to sort of tease out individuals. I work in a lot of film and TV. I work with Mike Lee on Mr. Turner and Peter Liu. And I think of it in the context of a cast of characters. I think there's only a certain amount of people I can keep in my head. And in order to make the point, the bigger point, it seems to me having a nice contained cast of characters allows you to zoom in on that individual and then make the bigger point about the general experience of people like those people. By zooming in, you not only create the context and you show what it must have been like for other people. But I hope that people get emotionally involved. There's an emotional pull there when you have a name and a face and you start to chart them through their lives through the various documentation, particularly if it's tragic. But also if you want the uptick, you want something good to happen to people, you know, you start to get emotional about it, that they're real, living, breathing people rather than just data from a census, you know, from fifty hundred years ago. They're real characters, real people. And I think that's important because we have to understand history as the history of people, you know, and what I love about the family history is that this is my history, it's your history, it's all our histories. It's not something that sits above and sort of impacts on us. It's how people, our ancestors, our forebears, even if we aren't blood relatives, it's about our forebears and how they live their lives and what they did, you know, impacts on us now. Everything impacts on us now. So we are learning about ourselves as we're learning about our ancestors, our forebears and our past.
- [35:39]
Interviewer/Host
That's a really interesting note to end on that, actually. This history has a lot to teach us about ourselves. Thank you very much for coming on today to talk to us about your book. It's been hugely interesting.
- [35:49]
Charlotte Vosper
Oh, it's my pleasure. It's been so such fun talking to you.
- [35:53]
Podcast Sponsor Announcer
That was Jacqueline Riding speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Jacqueline is a historian specialising in British history and the long 18th century. Her latest book is Hard Working Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin's London.
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Progressive Insurance Announcer
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Charlotte Vosper
49 or less.
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