Life on the mean streets of 19th-century London
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What was life like for London's poor working classes in the 19th century? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Jacqueline Ryding 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 be familiar, Charlie Chaplin. I'd like to start with a bit of scene setting. Your book, Hardstreet, is about the working class people who lived in South East London during the 19th century.
What was life like for working class people at this time? 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 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,
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