Norma Clarke at Literary Review:
Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) gets top billing in the subtitle of Hard Streets but he’s not the star of the show. The book begins with and is built around an earlier rags-to-riches tale and its wider purpose is to make us look closer at the rags and be less beguiled by the riches.
George Tinworth (1843–1913) – of whom, the author admits, few people will have heard – was born and grew up in the same Walworth neighbourhood where Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, was born in 1865 and where Charlie himself entered the world. Desperate poverty characterised this part of London. This much we know; but, as leisure and education and perhaps inclination to record experience were lacking at the time, what we actually know amounts to very little. Chaplin’s late-life My Autobiography (1964) is a celebrated working-class memoir; Tinworth also sat down in his sixties to recall his early years. Vividly expressed, ungrammatical and poorly spelt, ‘The Life of G Tinworth: A London Boy that become Wheelwright and Sculptor’ remains unpublished.
more here.
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