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NEWS! My book Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile Books) is out! Buy it here. Listen to me talking to Robert Elms on BBC Radio London here
“Part social history, part micro-biography and entirely compelling … Few historians have captured so well the texture of London’s poor without condescension or gloom … There is something almost Chaplinesque in Riding’s ability to blend tragedy and laughter, scholarship and sentiment, grime and grace” ― BBC History Magazine
“Powerful … a vivid picture of working-class life in the capital in the 19th and early 20th centuries … yet Riding also reveals bright spots in the gloom” ― The Times
“Powerful … Bleak and brutal … but also studded with colour, energy and joy … Riding plaits the local with the national, the personal with the political” Sarah Wise ― History Today
“A deeply researched and valuable book” ― Literary Review
“Meticulously researched … a fascinating collective portrait of the city in those times” ― Financial Times
“Fascinating” ― Country Life
Mike Leigh says: “Remarkable in scope and detail, this impressive evocation of the tough world that produced Chaplin is fascinating and often profoundly moving“
Hallie Rubenhold says: “Through her painstaking research, Jacqueline Riding has reconstructed a thoroughly engrossing and visceral picture of ‘how the other half lived’ in Victorian London. The dirty, vibrant streets of Charlie Chaplin’s childhood, the struggles of its inhabitants caught in the twisted web of work and poverty, addiction and temperance, violence and family life are sketched in uncomfortably vivid detail. Hard Streets is a rich and emotive study of a world now lost that will leave readers stunned“
Lucy Worsley says: “An enthralling journey through some of London’s hardest streets, in the company of a writer of integrity and passion“
I specialise in British history and art (an expert in the 1745 Jacobite Rising and British 18th-century painting, notably the work of William Hogarth and Joseph Highmore see British Art Network) and an advisor/consultant for museums, historic buildings, film and TV, including Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014), Peterloo (2018) and Wash Westmorland’s Colette (2018), and for Haigh Hall restoration project in Wigan (2024-2025). Among my current projects, I am advising on a forthcoming Hogarth exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and historical advisor for the forthcoming TV drama based on Chris Bryant’s 2020 non-fiction book The Glamour Boys: The Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought Hitler. Please contact me via jacqueline1697@gmail.com if you have a project you would like to discuss.
Hear me talking about an 18th-century art hoax on Lucy Worsley’s new podcast Lady Swindlers available now via BBC Sounds and discussing the 1745 Jacobite Rising and the Battle of Culloden with William Dalrymple and Anita Anand on their Empire podcast (broadcast 24 & 26 September 2024).
See “Recent News & Events” on this home page for details on my books Hogarth’s Britons (Paul Holberton 2023), Hogarth: Life in Progress (Profile Books 2021), Peterloo (Head of Zeus 2018), Basic Instincts (Paul Holberton 2017) and Jacobites (Bloomsbury 2016). To support your local bookshop you can buy them online via Hive or in your local bookshop. For all trade-book and related enquiries please contact my literary agent Bill Hamilton at AM Heath.
I am the literary editor for the international The Art Newspaper and review books for this title, Country Life and BBC History Magazine.
