After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - How Grim Were Victorian Slums?

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

We've spent a lot of time in of Victorian London on this podcast- a world of cobbled streets, grimy buildings and crowded homes. But how accurate is this- what was it really like to live in the slums of Victorian London?Our guest today is Dr. Jackie Riding! Jackie is a specialist in the history of the 18th and 19th centuries, and her most recent book, ‘Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London’ was published earlier this year. Jackie, welcome to After Dark!This episode was edited by Anna Brant. Produced by Tomos Delargy and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Looking for more shady and sinister stories, sign up to History Hit. You can join us to explore the tragic life of the Bronties or discover the chilling story of Burke and Hair. Plus, with your History Hit subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe to start exploring the past. cramped slums, horrific workhouses and crime-ridden streets. These are the images that have come to define Victorian London, but have we been getting it all wrong? Beyond the headlines and the hardship lived millions of ordinary Londoners,

raising families, building communities, and finding moments of joy. In this episode, we'll explore the real working-class London of Charlie Chaplin's childhood and ask, was this as filthy and beautiful? dangerous a place as we've been led to believe. What was everyday life like in Victorian London? From the bustling metropolis at the heart of the British Empire, welcome to After Dark. Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And in this episode, we're going to be delving into a place and time that is familiar to us on After Dark, the Victorian slum, one that we know very well, or do we? We're going to be thinking about what it was like to be a working class

Londoner on these streets in an iconic moment in the city's history. And to take us through this history, we are very lucky to be joined by the one and only Dr. Jacqueline writing, or Dr. Jackie writing is what we're going to call her on the pot. And Jackie is a specialist in the history of 18th and 19th centuries. And her most recent book, Hard Streets, Working Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin's London was published earlier this year. Jackie, welcome to after Dar. Hello. I can't believe it's taken this long to have Jackie on the heart. I was literally thinking that as I was reading that house. Yeah, exactly.

She's been pestering us for decades now. We've been pestering her. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It is that way around. Jackie, we're going to be talking about London in the 19th century. This is partly from your new book about Charlie Chaplin's London and thinking about the sort of roots that he came from and what that environment was like.

Let's start with a bit of context. late 19th, early 20th century in the city of London moving from that Victorian to Edwardian period I suppose the version of this that people might know is thinking about sort of Jack the Ripper, the Whitechapel murders, that very dark, violent time. People might also, I suppose, think about Dickens,

a Christmas Carol, maybe a bit of Arthur Conan Doyle, that kind of, the sort of rich layering of the city, the way that in Sherlock Holmes novels, you know, the sort of mapping of it in terms of different social classes, unusual behaviours. It's a sort of chaosy place in terms of our cultural understanding of it, maybe a dangerous place. Is that fair? We might find it a bit chaotic, but I think people who were living there. I thought it was just life. It was what was going on. I mean, the bit of London that the book focuses on is an unusual bit of London because it's not north of the river. You know,

it's not Combegarden, Westminster or indeed the East End and, you know, the sort of docks and stuff that is actually south of the river. So it's the area of North Lambeth Borough, the borough of Lambeth, the north Lambeth, so sort of Waterloo area, down to Vauxbridge via Kennington and Lambeth proper. And then just across to the right, you've got the borough of Southwark. And so it's Bermondsey, you know, in the north, Southwark itself. And then down through Elephant and Castle to Walworth, which is the part of this bit of London that Chaplin was born in 1889. That's very interesting actually Because when I read the book

One of the things that stood out to me Was the sense of community and neighbourhood And we'll come to talk to that But you just mentioned there This isn't East London This isn't Coffin Garden What do you think stood out to you As setting this part of London

In this time apart from those Perhaps more well-known places Was there something distinct that you're like Seems very below the river more so than anything else? Well, I suppose the easiest way to describe it or to at least point to are the maps of London in this period. I mean, we're all 18th century bods.

So we know the famous map from the middle of the century, Rokes map, which shows very little south of the river. You've got Lambeth Palace, which is where the Archbishop Cantery is. That's directly opposite the Palace of Westminster. You've got dribs and drabs and bits of building work. You've got the occasional gallows and gibbits and things, which welcomed people to London. in the 18th century. And then you've got some manufactory,

but in the mid-18th century, there's barely anything apart from around the south side of London Bridge. North of the river, of course, you've got the docks, you've got the central part of London, and the city as well. Nothing north of St. Pancras, though,

where we would now go to catch our trains. There's nothing north of there. So it's a relatively small city in the 18th century, mid-18th century. By the beginning of the 19th century, you've got increasingly people moving into the south of London, because that's where the space is. So it's a very sort of residential area

and it's places where people are coming to from the outer counties, the southern counties, around London, so Sussex, Surrey, Kent, parts of Essex and stuff, coming in, particularly during the 1840s, the hungry 40s, to find works that are coming off the agriculture land and coming into London.

So you might then think that this area of South London is very residential, it's all cottages and sort of Georgia houses and things like that, which is true. But increasingly, it was also a place where there was manufacturing too. Because, of course, anywhere that's next to the river has easy access to barges and things to and fro. And so the whole of the coast, as well, the edge of the river, which is now embanked, largely

embanked, but from, let's say, Vauxhall Bridge north and then around to Waterloo, Southw, Bermansy, you've got manufactories. And in the book, I point out the fact that everyone thinks of the dark satanic mills of William Blake's imaginings is the Midlands of England, you know, it's sort of Staffordshire and that kind of area. But he was almost certainly, bearing mind he lived in Lambeth, almost certainly thinking of the gutted mills that were actually on the South Bank of the Thames. So I think we forget that London was a major centre for production and manufacturing as well. And this was all going on in this bit of South London.

And then I suppose the only thing I should sort of observe is that the area of Lambeth, which is where Chaplin moves to after he's born in Warworth, was also famous for its potteries, which again is something we don't think of. But if you look at Lambeth Potteries, you know, this is Dalton's, Dalton & Co. And only moved to the Midlands, Staffordshire, in the 1950s.

but up to that point from late 18th century onwards, it was a Lambeth pottery. So if you look at the underside of the pots and stuff, it's got Lambeth. It's stamped with Lambeth. So these were all opportunities for working people, poor working people, to gain employment. It was, yeah, so manufacturing,

and then, of course, also the music hall. Yeah, so let's, first of all, just to say, as someone who was born south of the river in this area, and I grew up in Stature, oh, my ears. I'm freaking out of all this. This is spot on for me. Let's talk about what life was like, what the conditions were like for working class people in this part of London then, Jackie. Because you talk about the sort of the influx of workers from the countryside coming in and the buildup of this area of London, both residential but in terms of this industry.

Can we expect the sort of overcrowding that we're maybe familiar with in terms of Victoria, London? Is this happening south of the river as well? And it was dramatic. I think that's the big difference. is that north of the river there was this, you know, cheat by jail, people living on top of each other, you know, mass occupancy of in this area in Spittalfields, you know, early Georgian houses, absolutely up to the gunwales with different people, different families on different floors. A similar thing was happening south of the river, but I think at a much faster rate, it was most demonstrably faster rate, because there was land, there was space. So you get a massive development of, as I say, these little cottages, the sort of, you know, two-bayfront. cottages, etc. But then increasingly you get the higher-rise, more high-rise blocks for sort of

multi-occupancy and stuff. And, and, you know, I mean, for example, if you think of Walworth, which is where Chaplin was born, at the turn of the century, there was about 15,000 people who lived in Walworth. It was a horticultural area. The oval cricket ground, which is the most famous bit of the southern bit of Lambeth, was actually built on or was created on horticultural land. It was on market gardens. So that's what people were coming in to do, to come in off the land and then work in in horticulture. And of course you've got borough markets, which is where they would sell the produce. So you've got about 15,000 people living, even in the 1840s, 30s, 40s, in an environment that was quite villagey almost. But then by the turn of the century, by the end of

the 19th century, 120,000 people were living in that less than a square mile. So that's the scale of the development and the change over that period. And Chaplin is in the tail end of it, but he would have witnessed a lot of this influx of people into this area. You set up this image really nicely, Jackie, of the world that's starting to build around. But let's zoom in a little bit on the Chaplin household in particular. Are they a typical family? And what is that domestic experience like? So both Charlie Chaplin's mother and father were music calls. artists, artists. The mother trained as a machinist.

She actually sort of made piecework. She did piecework on the side. But her real dream was to be a musical performer. And she was actually at the age of 16, she had an agent. And there's a bill, a sort of performing bill, you know, sort of musical bill, that has her sort of halfway up the bill. And at the bottom is Mary Lloyd, who of course we've all heard of. So to start off with, she had real big.

potential and clearly had a, you know, a good career. The father was actually more successful. He, Charles Spencer Chaplin Sr. He's a bit older than Hannah, Hannah Chaplin. And he's already an established mid-range performer, shall we say. He's actually in 1890, just within a year or so of Chaplin's birth. He's already gone to America. He's doing a tour of America.

And their marriage was more or less over. So, in fact, Charlie Chaplin barely knew his father at all. and the mother already had a half-brother, had a child from another relationship she'd had before she married Charles Chaplin. So I'm not sure how usual that was, but it wasn't unusual if you see what to mean that there would be this sort of constant relationships

and chopping and changing. They were, after all, performers in the musical, and it was just that kind of life. She actually does have another relationship with a man soon after, so there's in fact three half-brothers, at least, as far as we know. So that's the sort of slightly chaotic life that certainly Hannah was living and therefore her son, Sid, the elder, the elder brother by four years and Charlie too. It's interesting to get that behind closed doors look on things, isn't it?

But when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about London life more specifically, particularly in terms of sanitation and health. Jackie, what I think is so interesting about Charlie Chaplin's story and the way that you tell it is, you know, the sort of rise of this star from such low beginnings really and and the sort of the grimy context from from which he rose up um let's just talk a little bit more about Victorian London we've talked about this overcrowding and we have an image here um from your book that is titled sufferers from the floods and it's I suppose a witnessing a documentation of the sort of standards of life and the hardships that people were subjected to and that they lived with, you know, this wasn't sort of crisis moments in people's lives,

but in terms of the sort of the poverty, the lack of health, I'm looking at this image and it's a shop front, a Victorian shop front, and there are several figures outside of it. There's a woman holding a baby in her arms and there's a man next to her in, in fairly sort of scruffy clothes really quite worn down and he has a bucket before him. And then in the doorway of the shop is another woman who is quite large. She's again wearing quite sort of aged scruffy clothes. She has a white apron on. And she's sort of surrounded by a smattering of grubby children.

What are the conditions in which people are living in terms of health, sanitation, poverty. And is this image representative of the kind of environments that Chaplin would have known? Yeah, I think so. I mean, this is a photograph from the 1870. 1877 I have here in my notes. Yeah. And the woman, the more sort of healthy looking fed lady, is Mrs. Rowlett.

She owned a rag store in Lambert. You wouldn't cross her. You wouldn't cross her for your life. She packs a punch. She packs a punch. So she runs her own business and it's not, you know, this is the typical business, but she has her own shop. She's not a costamonger. She's not ambling the streets with a cart, selling clothes door to door or in market stores and things.

So she actually has her own shop. So she's, you know, she's probably poor, but she's not the poorest of the poor. And I think we have to bear in mind the whole time that there are grades, even within the poor working class in this area, across London and indeed the United Kingdom. you have these grades of poverty and people moved up and down quite frequently and they kind of boom and bust of employment. But somebody like Mrs. Rowlett

probably had a more regular wage than most. And she also seems to have generated enough income to pay for her daughter to have music lessons because we had this idea of the working class, the poor working class as being sort of subjugated and having education thrust upon them and nobody wants to do it. And some were like that

because their kids were in fact earning money for the household. They were bringing money in. If you take a child or put a child in school, you lose that income and you've got to pay for the schooling, which happened post-1870 with the Education Act. So some people were dead against, you know, some working class people, culturally were against education,

whereas somebody like Mrs. Rowell, it's such a wonderful example. We actually have a quote from her, talking about her wanting better for her daughter and doesn't want her daughter to be sort of roaming the streets with rags in, rags in a card. She wants her to earn her living in a more refined way or at least a more regular way. So there is real aspiration.

So there's real aspiration among someone. So she gets her daughter is taught to play the piano and to teach music. So that kind of reminds me, you talked about Conan Doyle. That reminds me of the solitary cyclist where you have Violet Smith is obviously taught music so she can earn a living through. And it's a more refined way of earning money. The reason why they're victims of the floods is partly because the embanking of the Thames on that side of the river, on the Lambeth side of the river. So all these manufacturers, this sort of absolute cobble of different buildings of late 18th

century, 19th century buildings, which are sort of spewing out smoke and dirt, you know, from the manufacturing of ceramics, potteries, but also soap, you know, everything was being manufactured there. This was all embanked. It was all removed, destroyed. it in the 1860s, partly as part of the sort of sanitation as well, but the embanking of the Thames. And it therefore meant that there was more flooding in certain areas as a result of the embanking, ironically enough.

So she's complaining about the fact that, you know, posh people get their nice sewers and they're nice running tap water. And we, meanwhile, have to deal with the floods in our houses and stuff. And then the other people in that photograph, of course, have been thrown out of their houses, They are homeless. So hence they're wandering the streets with their kiddie. And Mrs. Rowlett is obviously extending some hospitality to them.

Because I think that's the other thing. You know, people in adversity do help each other out. And, you know, it takes a neighbourhood or a village to raise a child, etc. Yeah. But you do have a lot of kids on the streets, on their own unsupervised. And, of course, that can lead to all sorts of trouble too. Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of interested in this. You know, I think we have a sense of 19th century London as this kind of bleak place.

And that's not to say that it wasn't. And, you know, it's, we can't deny the disease, the poverty, the lack of sanitation, the crime rate, etc. Yeah. Invent deaths. Exactly. All of this. But I think what your book captures and what we see here, I mean, I've got the quote from Mrs. Rowlett in her shop doorway. She says, the flood.

She says, the water don't come into the drawing room of fine folks. We would hear more of it if it did. Yes. And there's a kind of a humor, I suppose, a comedic outlook. I mean, obviously, you know, she is complaining about the inequality, but there's a sort of ryeness there. And I wonder if that's something you came across again and again to all these communities. And thinking of Chaplin, you know, is this great comedic genius who comes from this world. But there's a sort of a, I suppose an antidote to a lot of this suffering and this darkness that you have to look for the humor in it, right?

Well, I think that's exactly what Chaplin taps into is that sort of wry humor, you know, make the best of it. I mean, not everybody did, obviously, but there is a kind of an underlying sense of, you know, will you've lived another day? You know, and Mrs. Rowland, of course, is thinking to the future. So there's, it's not so short term. Whereas other people are living day by day. They're living until the wage packet comes in on the Saturday and they've spent it by the Monday, you know, it's that kind of thing. And saving up and stuff of that was simply wasn't within the orbit of people who have got very little to spend anyway, let alone save it. So increasingly you get people coming into the area, middle class people,

and we are really dependent on the mediation of these middle class folk who take the photographs, who interview Mrs Rowlett, who note down what she says, you know, and then obviously they might have adapted it, but we're slightly reliant on them reporting accurately what these people say. I sense that because he's tried to inject a bit of a London accent in there, but, you know, he's trying to do it. And the other people who, of course, are coming into the area

is people like the Charles Booth Project who are trying to work out just how poor, how much poverty there is in London, and what the grades are and how deep is abject poverty. And to everyone's actual surprise, it was about 35% of the working class in London was living in abject poverty.

That really is poverty. And so we are slightly sort of, we are dependent on this. But with the Charles Booth project, for example, you get more of this sort of reportage, you know, direct quotation of people who have been standing on the streets and then the investigators go up to them.

This is the 1880s onwards and going up to people and actually interviewing if they wanted to speak to these Toffs who were wandering around there, they're a bit of London. So there's a bit of agency there too. You don't have to speak to them. But they do report some direct language

and for a rarity to hear the working class, poor working class, actually speaking to any degree unless they've gone to court in the Hill Bailey transcripts and stuff you know that often certainly as you will well know Jackie

in the 18th century often the only way that we encounter people from the lower classes is when they've been accused of a crime The minute you're in the system I mean that's certainly I mean Chaplin we know a lot about him Charlie Chaplin because and his mother

and his grandmother because they all ended up in institutions and the minute you're in the institution you've been recorded you know you've got medical notes you've got references to their you know their condition And the mother eventually, both of them, where everybody goes into a workhouse at one point. But the workhouse was a sort of pool for all sorts of issues and difficulties that the poor working class were encountering.

Whereas towards the end of the century, they did start to build these massive lunatic as they called them. And so the workhouse is less of a place where everybody is thrown in together and more of a sort of a place where people are, the administration they set up and then they're sort of moved on to a place like an asylum as opposed to staying within a workhouse which is simply there to keep you off the street to feed you, you're given work

like breaking up stones and pulling bits of rope off to bits and stuff like that. But that's when you get the detail, that's when you get the references to things like their deaths, you know, where they're buried. You know, because of the way

they're referred to that they are monitored and then sort of noted down. So that's that you suddenly get that wealth. And I think I wonder whether, in fact, that's partly why we have such a dur idea of the period is because all we ever hear, it feels, all you ever hear, all the data we have is actually referring to people in real difficulty. Most working class people wouldn't contemplate,

unless they were really, really desperate, wouldn't cross the threshold of a workhouse. That was seen as the lowest of the loan. You had to survive somehow. And you had to survive through the sort of, you know, the, what the family could generate or income that family could generate. Hence the issue around kids being educated and being out of the economy, the domestic economy of the household. And, you know, hence that, that, you know, the difficulty of actually changing that cycle, sometimes a spiral of poverty. Because it's, you know, it's devil in the deep sea when it comes to things like education.

I'm getting a sense of a world in which there is obvious hardship and then we have this kind of levity or this this aspiration and this comedy potentially and talking of institutions you know we have the sort of the workhouse on the one side and we know that chaplain himself became an inmate at Newington workhouse didn't yeah he was in Lambeth Workhouse there's two workhouses in Lambeth alone he went to the one on ring for a lot they're about the area it tells you they were they were from the one was from the 1850s and one

was in the 1870s so it shows you and I think it shows you the levels not only of population growth but the levels of difficulty people are experiencing the amount of you know the both the mother Hannah and her mother Mary Ann Hill both have case notes where they're described as being distressed and you know through alcohol and worry yeah that's why they've ended up with with mental health issues and are now in the workhouse and then both of them are sent to various these two particularly big asylums for South London, at Bandsford and Kanehill

near Croydon. But it's that that pithy description of sort of worry, drink and worry, being why they're here. It's almost as simple as that. Of course, what's it behind that description is massive. Yes. But what I tried to do,

because of this rarity of this sort of, you know, this sudden glimpse of people's lives, looked either side of the famous Chaplin families entries, whether it's a school entry or a workhouse entry or an asylum entry, and see who else has gone into the workhouse on the same day or within days and what's happened to them and their lives. And so the book is trying to, he's using Charlie Chapin as a hook because he's one

the most famous working class autobiographies ever. He was a man who literally went from rags to riches. So he's the kind of hook to pull you in to then exploring the broader issues around, and, you know, his neighbours, his family, his friends. And then just people that they probably would only pass in the street, but happened to enter the same institution on the same day. And to show that actually the drink and worry was such a broad issue. And I think the pressures and the stress that people must have been living under

must have been, well, unbearable for some. I love that phrase, the drink and the worry. And I think just, yeah, thinking about that duality that we have, the institutions like the workhouse and then we have the music hall as a separate institution. You're desperate for something funny. We've got to have some laws.

I think there is a sort of antidote. There is a sort of contrast there that I think is so interesting and must have been so poignant to the people living in this world. And of a drunk is one of Chapin's first big roles is the inebriated drunk. It tends to be the Toff drunk

so it's like the champagne Charlie type drunk. But obviously he's as a child has been observing drunks, tottering around the streets, you know, tumbling out of pubs. And I found this fabulous quote from one of the social workers, middle class Oxford social workers who come into South London, trying to make it a better place. I know we can get quite sniffy about this, this is like this paternalistic and patronising. But they were doing something, they were trying to do something to help.

And I think it's very laudable personally. But one of them, speaking about the area, Southwark and Lambeth areas, talks about the kids imitating the misdoings. of adults in pubs and imitating them. So it becomes a kind of scene where one would be the drunk, one would be the barman, one would be the police officer who picks the drunk off the pavement

and drags him home sort of thing. And the kids would all take a part and then play it out. And I have this sort of fantasy that one of those kids that she observed doing it was Charlie Chaplin. Absolutely. But of course he, alongside others,

but he in particular, took that observational skills that he has and transferred it into this sort of the tragedy comedy of the London streets and made made his name through it. What do you think a life depending on music hall as an industry was like? You already hinted that Hannah can't rely on it forever. So I'm just wondering if this is something where you're eking a living, when does

when does Chaplin himself, as in Charlie Jr., when does he start seeing some way that's more financially beneficial because it doesn't seem like this is necessarily the most stable job of all the jobs you could have in Victoria and London. No, I mean, it becomes a proper industry over the course of the 19th century. I mean, as you know, it starts off as just a Joanna in a room next to a pub, you know, a bar and it's just entertainment to keep the punters there drinking. And eventually the bar ends up being the smallest bit of the, you know, because there's a theatre attached and it becomes the music hall.

And it increasingly industrialised. A lot of the music halls were in the area in the same. London area, not unsurprisingly. So sort of Westminster Bridge Road, there was famous Gatis and the Canterbury. They were the famous musicals there. You've got all the agents living around Waterloo, so York Road and stuff, was where all the agents were. So this is where all the musical acts were living. It was in, you know, far south as Brickston, but, you know, around the Lambeth, Waterloo, Kennington areas, and the more wealthy they became, the nicer bits of that area they moved into.

And Chapin makes his lovely description of these music hall stars. And these are the stars. These are ones like Dan Lino earning 80 pounds a week. You know, it's that kind of thing. The stars with their diamond, you know, sort of jewelry

and their sort of their hats tilted in a sort of raffish way and going to the pubs on Kennington Road. And he felt it was like the sun and splendor sort of arriving. And then when they left for their Sunday lunch or something, then he says it's like the sun going behind the cloud as if everything had just disappeared.

So these were real idols. These were real sort of, you know, their lives were aspirational. But as we know from the life of Dan Lino, who dies in his 40s, possibly from syphilis. And but he was in mental as well, sort of a horrible, private ones, private asylums.

But, I mean, this is a man who earned a lot of money. But even then, the pressure, I guess, to perform, to be funny, the tragedy of the clown, I guess, to an extent, he ended up suffering and then dies very young. So, yeah, so there's a real tragedy comedy to the whole thing. It's not just the performance itself and the life that you're using as source material for that art, the art of what you're doing on the stage.

There's also a tragedy, commie tragedy to the lives themselves. But when you think of, I mean, you're an actor, you know, the stresses and strains. But, you know, on a normal night, by the time you get to the, you know, you start off with this bar with a, you know, a room next to it, the piano in it and people singing around. By the end of the century, so around the period when Chaplin's born and his father's involved in the 70s, 80s and stuff, you know, you've got these proper industry, you've got these massive places. And you need to earn money by basically going from music hall to physically from music hall to music hall in order to do the various

turns. And depending on the term, early evening is the cheapest, it's where the less experienced or the less popular ones are. By the end of the evening, you've got the real stars turning up and they earn more money per turn. So, you know, you could earn quite a lot, but the stress of moving from music hall to musical, sometimes in a carriage to get from A to B, I guess would have been quite fun in your 20s. By the time you're careering towards your 40s, you know, you're... I can attest to that, actually, can I just say?

The acting was great crack in my 20s and 30s. It was like, I got older. You kind of don't mind. You think it's all part of the thing. But by the time you, I guess the reliance, by the time you get to your 40s, you maybe have a family, a wife, family, etc. and the financial pressures are all coming on and you're not so new bowl, not so, not so lives, not so popular maybe.

So the top stars like the Lino's, the Dan Lino's, they were quite extraordinary. But somebody could earn a bobble too, but you had to just keep going. You had to keep sort of, you know, turning it out and keeping popular and keeping, I guess you're like anything, keeping your material fresh. So tapping into popular culture, the working class attitudes, to these middle class people who are turning up to sort them out, you know, and rescue them from themselves. You had to be tapped into the zeitgeist, I suppose, what the public mood is.

So the audience, which is working class, but also middle class, you know, you see the TV programs where you get the middle class is turning up for a bit of the old music hall, so they get sort of popular singers like Mary Lloyd and stuff on stage. And so you sort of, but in a way, it was working class culture being reflected back on an audience who knew what the performance. was talking about, they empathise with what the performer was saying and vice versa. So I guess the working class would have got more out of it than the people who were slumming it in working class areas. But it's, it is an industry and it's increasingly commercialised and the pressure

must have been enormous. But it was an opportunity, not just for the performers, but much like the Lambeth Potteries, you've got the behind the scenes, the fire stokers, in the music halls, you've got the guys with the scenery. Some of them are actually market porters. You did a bit of moonlighting by, you know, hence they could shin up ropes and stuff. And sailors. You know, you get, so the opportunity for employment is extraordinary. It's a real industry.

And the music call and then the potteries and the other manufacturers are exactly the same thing. But the thing, I mean, we'll all appreciate this because we love art and culture and stuff, is that art and culture was a real outlet. It was a real opportunity for employment beyond the, market porters and stuff. You could be involved in something, whether you're on the stage or behind the stage or serving in the bar or something. It was a real, real opportunity for a very various types of employment.

So, yeah, music hall was very popular and there's a lot of them. One of the other things you find, and we're going to talk about this when we come back after this break, is crime living side by side in some of these arenas. Inevitably. Inevitably. So we'll talk about that after this break. Okay, Jackie. So I think one of the things that we maybe associate most with Victorian London is crime.

You know, we've mentioned Conan Doyle before and the sort of, I suppose, the fictionalisation of it, the making it into a sort of puzzle or a game, it's so present in everyone's lives. But then at the opposite end of the scale, we have the Whitechapel murders and the brutality and the sort of visceral reality of that. How proportionate is our perception of London in the 19th century as filled with criminals? Well, I'm not an expert on criminality or the kind of thing. But my impression is that it's no better. It feels no better than worse than, you know, where we, us now.

Because I no doubt I could live around the corner from a, you know, a regular drug den or something. But I have no idea. It's only when you get told. I mean, there was criminality, of course. And lots of popular working class culture like the street culture and the fairs, the famous Camberwell Fair, which eventually got closed down because it was just riotous and noisy were magnets for criminality for pickpockets in its classic stuff and also where working class men young men for example might start to see role models that maybe aren't quite so what the middle class would like them to be

role models you know things like the criminality that was playing out on the stages so old old criminals like dick turpin for example were immensely popular in even into the 19th century as role models. See that's so interesting. We've still got that kind of the art and real life blurring. What's happening on the stage and what's happening on the streets is kind of in conversation with each other, even though on stage it's a harkening back to a previous century. Yeah, because they were just, they were like folk heroes. They were like working class heroes. Some of these guys, you know, in the audience watching, you know, Black Best, the kind of ride to York and all that. You know, a bit like far from the madding crowd,

Thomas Hardy. Yes, yeah. Watching that kind of thing playing out. would have seen this as being, you know, heroic. And some of them wouldn't have been able to read or write. So this was the closest thing they get to a storytelling. It's a bit like the classic sort of Bible, you know, in churches, in stained glass and stuff. This is the equivalent. And social reformers in the 1840s were terrified by how many young men who ended up in prison or in remand or in houses of correction who had no idea who the monarch was or indeed Jesus Christ.

But they knew who Dick Turpin was and Jack Shepherd. from the 18th century, you know, from the 17, 20s and 30s, partly because it became, this criminality became popular through the writings of William Harrison Ainsworth, who invented the right to York, by the way, so. Oh, yes. As a lot of it, as we all know. As previous York students, we're both very well as that.

Oh, stop it. Dictor again? No, no, not Dictor. No, the other one. Harrison Ainsworth, yeah. I suppose of mine. Do you know, we've just done an episode on Judge Shepard and I was saying I have a first edition of his,

Chuck Shepard. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. Well, all the images that were being replicated in the 18th century, you know, the kind of the famous drawing

by James Thornhill, so James Thornhill ends up being in cartoons in the 18th century and these are things on penny dreadfuls and broadsheets and stuff which are readily, you know, and so these guys

who were in prison or, you know, sort of been sort of put away for a bit, shocking the vickers who were visiting these prisons, you know, because they simply didn't know who the middle class thought they should know, but they knew all about the criminals. So yeah, so there is a juxtaposition.

I think now, as, you know, the old fares that travel around, there's always seen to be something sort of tantalizingly, you know, kind of a bit sort of the darker side, you know, with these fairs, particularly when the lights go down and you've got that sort of other world quality to that kind of thing. I suppose as well, it's a really amazing insight, actually, just thinking about, you know, people potentially in prison or workhouses who know who people like Jack Shepherd or Dick Turpinard but can't name the monarch that that says so much about their world view how they see themselves how they see their city the hierarchy how to get on in life how to navigate that world I wonder

how often unless they had to go for work you know if they were living south of the river how often they crossed the bridge to get to Westminster and stuff I don't I think it was just a world away and you know and that if you had to go for work you know like laundry, you were delivering laundry or something like that, then you might well pop over Blackfries Bridge or Southern Bridge or whatever. But this was your, this was your world and this is how you learned about life. And this street entertainment, you know, there was a lot of folk stuff that was still on the go, the jack in the green and all this sort of the misrule quality. It was still out there. And in fact, they're still done now. Yes. And I think even in the Lambeth, I think you have a jack in

the green and all that. So you got these sort of people of misrule. you know, the sort of those comedy de la carte almost quality to it are all part of the street culture and it's free and that's what you're... Yeah, and it's kind of subversive and sort of fun. So there's a lot more going on than just it's sort of paying a couple of shillings and going to the music hall. There is other entertainment going on as well,

but yes, there is also inevitably criminality. Well, talking about misrule and I suppose the sort of the reality versus the mythology in this area. Talk to me about Mary Carr and the 40 Thieves because we tend, I think, to kind of mythologise criminals in the 19th century, as the 19th century people did criminals in the 18th century. But this is a particularly fascinating gang, isn't it?

Of all women from the 1890s, around the time that Chapman... They might have been around in the 18th century. We don't know. It seems to be... It's part of their mythology. But the leader of the gang in the 1880s going into the 1890s was Polly Carr, Mary Carr. There was an all-male gang as well going around.

That was the hooligan gang. And I have this sort of fantasy that this inspired a clockwork orange because there's so much that's similar in their behaviour, but maybe it's just a trope of kind of what lads do when they gang together and start marauding around with sticks and stuff like that and pushing people off the street, off the pavement and stuff, yeah. That's so fascinating there that you can read that connect.

It was all in the, well, it felt so, I think even one of the name, one of them was called Alex something. There was even a sort of similar name to the guy. And I wonder, I wonder if he was ever reading these newspaper reports because it's all there describing these guys and stuff. But yeah, so roughly the same time, maybe a bit later, you've got this, this Polly is in charge of. She's like a kind of female fagin who seems to gather women around her who would otherwise be vulnerable. and because they form part of a gang, they feel more protected and it's about women protecting themselves and each other. And they didn't tend to rob in their own patch.

I was going to use another phrase, but I won't. They tended to cross the Waterloo Bridge to the Strand, which was rich pickings, because that's where the toss were drunk, out of the opera house and stuff. And we'd just hang around and then sort of, you know, charm the drunk males and then pick their pockets and stuff at that. So it was a kind of thieving gang. at that point anyhow.

That's certainly how they had been reported on in the newspapers. And then they'd pop back over Waterloo Bridge and they'd hit the new cut, you know, that near the old Vic, and kind of go to the street markets and have a blow out and then they'd go to the music hall with their spoils. And it all sounds rather fun. Until it's not so much fun. And this is the thing about this.

The mythology is that this is all japes and larks and stuff. But it's not. I mean, they are surviving on this. They're forming again to protect them. I think largely to what's going on. It's a kind of employment. It's a sort of, you know, a self-reliance, a sort of reliance between the group. It does involve women, young women and even girls within this gang.

Polly finally ends up at the old Bailey because she's kidnapped a child from the Derby, from the Epsom Derby. Wow. Not great. That's an escalation from pickpocketing. Just a smidge. And I don't know. It seems to be unusual for her. but I think she's spotted this idea of her being a protector of the vulnerable.

Maybe it seems to be how it's reported. It's certainly how it's reported. It seems to be what her motivation is. But she sees this child who may have been suffering from congenital syphilis or some form of disease. He certainly had it. That's what the medical report says from the old Bailey. So she might have seen this vulnerable child, thought the mother wasn't treating him properly and decided to just remove him.

So she tries to enlist a male colleague to, help her kidnap this child and a year later or so the child is found by the police in her house in Waterloo on Stanford Road in Waterloo. So she has taken the child. She's clearly looking after him but it just as you say it's a bit of an escalation from what she was what she was known for before. So yeah she ends up in the old Bailey is you know she gets done for the for the kidnapping and ends up in hard labour for two or three years. I think she gets out after two to three years. But by the time she gets out, of course, there's another queen of the 43s has taken over

because the gang needs a leader and there's somebody's already taken it. So this wild lifestyle that seems so hilarious and wonderful and sort of self-reliant suddenly becomes what it is, which is just like a, you know, it's like a vapour. It just sort of disappears and you're back on your uppers. The other thing apparently she's supposed to have done, which might be a fabrication by over-eager male reporters, is that she was known to model for artists.

So you and Nina like this. Maddie and I were like this as art historians. So it's alleged that one of the people that she sat for, probably in the nude, in his own house, was Lord Layton, who had died only a year before she was sent off to the old Bailey for the kidnapping. So I think he was, in fact he had already died, means that he became sort of ripe for this gossip in the journals and the news. papers and stuff. They didn't actually name him, but they sort of inferred that he was a leader of the British art.

Established him, of course, he was president of the Royal Academy at the time he died. So, so again, you've got these little fantasies of Polly Carl, the sort of the Queen of the 43s on a sort of fur rug at Leighton House. I want to watch that film for years. So this again is all part of this mythology, but women did earn men and women from the working class, earned very good money being models, private models, in artist's studios like Lord Layton, but also at the Academy itself. There's cash books that tell you how much they're earning. They're earning pounds. And this is an environment where you pay shillings a week for your accommodation. If you're earning pounds per, you know, five-week session at the Royal Academy just by taking your kit off, you know, and you've got more for taking your kit off if you're a

woman, you know, if you're happy with that, if you're okay with that, and not everyone would be, then as a life model, yeah, it was another outlet. So just look at the arts, how The opportunities. I mean, middle-class women wouldn't do it. Yes, yeah. But, you know, if you didn't, you know, mind and if you, it's better than some other options you have and it's good money, then... And it could elevate you into circles, not necessarily to have the same opportunities as your male counterparts, but thinking of people like Lizzie Siddell, for example, who, you know, is sort of picked up as a model for the Preraphilites and ends up married to Rosetti and all of that. And, you know, for me, it's a tragic end.

And that, we need to do that as a whole episode. But, you know, there's a kind of an opening there, I suppose. It's a different world. Yeah. Opens up. And I think it's, if you think that her day job was robbing on the streets and then in the evening she might have been at the Royal Academy modeling. And then ended up a portrait of her ends up on the wall of the Royal Academy.

The difference between those two sort of life, the lifestyle that she's leading is hectic, but, you know, could have been quite fun. That's something that is coming out for me in this whole conversation actually, Jackie. is that the sort of, you know, we think of the Victorian world as very rigid, very hierarchical. It's full of institutions and rules and clear punishment if you break those rules, or so we think. And yet this world south of the river is very fluid. The ways that communities are shaped is not necessarily the traditional household with a family in it. You know, you've described floods in which people become homeless and are helped by various members of the community.

We've got gangs of women grouping together to keep themselves safe. and we've got people coming and going from the workhouse. So the sort of the shape and structure of these little pockets of life is very changeable and actually quite nuanced and complicated. And, you know, the fact that, as you say, women could be artists models. And so you have that kind of, yes, the contrast between rich and poor and sort of high and low life, but also the sort of fluidity of movement between those. Talk to me then about the attempts, I suppose, to put pack some of that order.

I'm thinking about the policing of this world. We've spoken about the criminal aspect of it and the sort of chaos of it. But this is a world in which the police are relatively new as a force in terms of their training, but also it's the rise of the detectives in this moment, isn't it? Yes, and of course Mr. Witcher comes from Camberwell, so he's a South London as well.

I mean, everybody was in South London. I don't know why you bother with nothing. I just don't know why you do. All the best people are from there. Everybody's from there. I mean, when I started realizing, when you start off with an idea for a book, You have a kind of, you know, a kind of, you know, a Scooby-Doo sense, sort of that something might be there.

There might be something to chivy out sort of thing. And it's only when you really start immersing and you think, oh my God, you know, X was in Lambeth Workhouse or Y was doing this. Or, you know, you're on the right track, isn't it? So, because obviously if you're dealing with an area that's less well-known, apart from, we like to keep it secret south of the river, but, you know, it's less well-known. when you start to realise you've got all these characters, these famous characters like Charlie Chapin, Dan Lino, Mary Lloyd, you know, Jack Witcher, you know, all these people who've become real, you know,

famous characters from the 19th century and into the 20th. They're all in this area. You feel that this might be a place that people do know. They just don't realise that witches from Camberwell. So when you're reading about that hideous child murder, you're talking about somebody who was born and raised, in South London and he was one of the first complement of detectives in the 1840s and stuff.

And that's where he was living. So he's right next to the Camber Welfare, the famous fair, where all the doings go on and stuff like that. So it's sort of, yes, it's a very rich. It's, and it, I suppose we've got to get back to this idea that there is laughter there. There is fun and laughter. And some people would have lived and loved and died and have never been registered by the powers that be in the institutions.

So we don't know about them, but they probably led or could have left perfectly happy lives. So we can't think of everybody as being victims. But I think what we've got to be mindful of, which is picked up by the Charles Booth poverty maps, is this cycle of

poverty. How close you were to deprivation if something goes wrong. A flood happens. You get kicked out of your house. You can't afford the rent. Chaplin's story, I mean, Charles Booth shows you a snap

It's only when Roundtree does his investigation into York that he talks about the cycle of poverty. The snapshot is not static. It's constantly moving because of the availability of employment. And of course, there's no medicine here. There's no national health service. There's no welfare state at all until after the Second World War. The poor law only got got rid of completely after the Second World War when the welfare state comes in. It finally gets officially removed.

moved. But that's what everyone was relying on if you really fell on hard times before the Second World War was the poor law, which was first established in the Elizabeth I think it's the final year Elizabeth I think it's the final year Elizabeth I reign. That's when it starts and it's revised over the course of the years. And it reaches so far into the 20th century. But then you realize how difficult and how vulnerable and tenuous and slippery people's lives were. If you've got nothing, no safety net at all, apart from this, the workhouse. Which eventually everyone, everyone. is funneled into, then that's what you've got. So hence, of course, you're going to have, if you have a sense of humour, it's going to be a bit rye, isn't it? It's going to be a bit sort of. It's also why Chaplin, I think, and this is why you do what you do. So well, is a great mirror through which to reflect on some of these histories. So if you would like to know more about those histories generally, but specifically in terms of the chaplains, then Hard Streets, Working Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin's, London is

out now. Were this book to be turned into a film and we saw young Charlie Chaplin on screen, who would you want playing him? See, I have, I always have Ben Wishaw in my head. Oh, lovely. Because he's handsome and Charlie was certainly handsome, you know,

with the icy blue eyes and this shock of black hair, curly hair. So I think he would be perfect. Whether he being a mature chap these days, is there another, is he, has he got a younger brother or something? No, we Swabbing.

But he's that look. Yeah, totally. Gaunt, you know, attractive. Do you know who might be good? And oh gosh, what's his name? He's in Heartstopper. And he's another gay actor. I'm just trying to cast gay actors and everything now.

He's Joe Locke. Oh, yes. Joe Locke could do, in terms of the youth element of that, could do that. Because he's got some of that character, but also quite ethereal looking. Well, it's funny you should say that, you two, because I've always thought that there's still a movie to be done on the early years of Charlie Chaplin. I think because I think it has, there's so much going on.

And you would hope, wouldn't you, that the book provides other characters that can fit it out. It's not just the Chaplin family, but what else is going on? Hopefully it adds layers of meaning and layers to Chaplin's well-known biography, supplementing to a vast degree,

his autobiography as well, and sort of adding a bit more colour and shape and detail to what was happening at the time. I mean, I remember the Dickie Attenborough movie really only focuses on his early life quite briefly, I think, because it's about 20 years I cover in this book. But I think it was just focused on that, you know, the early years of Charlie and him going through the motions of becoming, inspired by his parents, becoming a musical performer himself.

He actually did perform in the Sherlock Holmes in the West End. He was Billy the Page Boy. Tip of a part And Conan Doyle loved it so much He actually wrote it into the Into the books Because it's around the same time That he's writing them

So that's where he gets his big stage You know starting The big start was there Was that So yeah So I think it's got something Because we all know what happens to him So where does he come from

But don't go there It's the creation story Yeah yeah Yeah I think Hannah's a really fascinating character I think the father's really amazing dies at 37. Last time Charlie sees him is in a pub

in, you know, opposite the Imperial War Museum, which is still there, three stags. He sees him. So there's bits of London that are still there. There's still Charlie Chapman's London is still very much there. Yeah. Come on.

Somebody do it. If you are a filmmaker watching this, or if you are Joe Locke watching this, or if you are Ben Whishaw's younger brother watching this. No, just Ben Whishaw. Can we just have been? There's Ben Whishaw in everything, cast in every part.

Exactly. A one-man show with Ben Whishawr playing everyone. then get in touch sort it out thank you very much to Jackie oh thank you very much she's been great from it's been so much fun

it's been so much fun yeah that's what we do here is the perfect balance of south of the river obviously after we've established thank you for listening at home watching along on YouTube if you've enjoyed this

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