Edgar’s Guide to Charlie Chaplin’s London

Charlie Chaplin. The mere mention of the name instantly conjures up the image of a small man, wearing oversized, baggy trousers and tight black jacket, and sporting a hat, cane and toothbrush moustache. Chaplin was the world’s first film star, becoming incredibly popular as silent movies exploded in the early twentieth century, his comedy short films making him a millionaire almost overnight. But before landing in America and entering the burgeoning film industry, Chaplin had spent his early years in poverty-stricken South London, brought up by a mother struggling with mental illness, his father almost entirely absent from his young son’s life. Edgar’s Guide to Charlie Chaplin’s London is the ultimate walking tour around the sites of the future comic genius’s boyhood, from the tucked-away church where his parents married to the workhouse the family were forced to enter when their luck finally ran out. This pocket-sized book is packed full of information. Our step-by-step directions will steer you around the streets of Walworth, Kennington and Lambeth, taking you to more than twenty sites associated with Chaplin’s earliest days, from the street in which he was born to the apartment he furnished with brother Sydney as a bolt-hole for when they were in London following vaudeville tours – the loss of which made him determined to return to America for good. Stand on the spot outside one of the family’s many homes where the young Charlie laughed at a sheep which had temporarily escaped from the herd being taken to the nearby slaughterhouse, only to then realise in horror its fate once it was recaptured, and sit at the table where Chaplin saw his father for the final time, shortly before his death.