Methravia – …the ‘modestly attractive backwater’…

Turning to the question of the social condition of Chaplin’s South London childhood, you accuse me of placing such a strong emphasis on the the pleasantness of the Methley Street rooming house where young Charlie and his mother, Hannah Hill Chaplin, resided for a time that I leave no room for the possibility that their life there was shadowed by financial difficulty.

 ”You can worry about where the next meal is coming from in the most pleasant of rooms,” you write, “and you can be very poor some of the time even if you have a windfall now and again.” But the truth is that I stress the precariousness of Hannah’s situation in all of her perches, including the one in Methley Street. “If the frequency of her changes of residence was any indication, the lovers who enabled Hannah to rent decent lodgings, quickly became disillusioned with her erratic behavior and dropped out of sight, leaving her at the mercy of that awesome figure of late-Victorian urban culture, the landlady…. In the quiet and modestly attractive backwater of Methley Street…she may have soon run into trouble about the rent.” Perhaps this was the reason, I go on to suggest, that she agreed to allow Charlie, at the tender age of nine, to join a music-hall troupe.”

Kenneth S. Lynn – New York Review of Books, 25-9-97

Methley Street is said to be the inspiration for the setting of ‘The Kid’ as well as the home of the blind girl in ‘City Lights’.”