Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the streets trying to find enough to eat to keep alive, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel that exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it you go down to defeat.
— Chaplin1
FOR CHARLIE, ENTERING THE HANWELL ORPHANAGE meant the loss of his hair, his clothes, his mother, his belongings, his dignity, his autonomy, and free access to Syd. For Lily, it meant food for her sons and a roof over their heads. Giving up her stage name for her legal name in order to apply for relief as a pauper was the penultimate comeuppance for the formerly proud and glamorous ex-actress. But from Hannah Chaplin’s perspective, the workhouse and orphanage were safer bets than the slums of London.
Not everyone saw it that way. The Poor Laws created living conditions that denigrated and humiliated adult members of the underclass seeking relief at public expense in order to discourage them from doing so. In his 1903 study of the London poor titled People of the Abyss, which he researched by living among them, the American author Jack London described a woman who preferred suicide (by drowning) over the poorhouse because of the psychological humiliation and physical deprivation she anticipated. Regarding her choice, London wrote: “I, for one, from what I know of canals and workhouses, should choose the canal, were I in a similar position.” He added that “the one attribute common to all [long-term] workhouse inmates … is … unhesitating obedience, passing into servility.”
Fortunately for Charlie and Syd, they were not exposed to a workhouse experience for very long. A more enlightened welfare policy had already begun to separate some indigent children from their pauper parents by transferring them from poorhouses to orphanage schools like Hanwell instead of subjecting them to the indifferent care their parents received as punishment for their failure to be self-sufficient members of society.
Charlie spent three weeks in the poorhouse before they shipped him to Hanwell. From the start, he relied on the same coping strategy he followed throughout his eighteen-month stay at the orphanage. When life became unbearable, he went somewhere else and became someone else. As he later put it:
My brother Syd and I were sent to the poorhouse. English people have a great horror of the poorhouse: but I don’t remember it as a very dreadful place. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember much about it. I have just a vague idea of what it was like. The strongest recollection I have of this period of my life is of creeping off by myself at the poorhouse and pretending I was a very rich and grand person.… I was of a dreamy, imaginative disposition. I was always pretending I was somebody else and the worst I ever gave myself in these daydreams and games of “pretend” was a seat in Parliament for life and an income of a million pounds. Sometimes I used to pretend that I was a great musician, or the director of a great orchestra; but the director was always a rich man. Music, even in my poorhouse days, was always a passion with me.2
Precisely who young Charlie became was far less important than the psychological self-protective device he employed. As a self-soothing seven-year-old in an orphanage, he resorted instinctively to that similar “let’s pretend” game that his plucky seamstress-mother had already modeled for him when she escaped the painful daily reality and oppressive poverty of her own life by dressing up as Lily Harley or “doing” Nell Gwyn or the empress Josephine.
And so when Chaplin at age fifty passed that same legacy on to his own son Charlie Chaplin Jr. by recalling how he had coped with adversity as a pauper in the poorhouse and inmate in the orphanage by pretending that he already was “the greatest actor in the world,” there is good reason to believe that he was describing an actual childhood experience, not concocting some retrospective cock-and-bull story for his namesake son’s edification (or his own self-glorification).
By pretending to be a world-famous somebody instead of an orphanage nobody, seven-year-old Charlie transformed his world from menacing to manageable. While obediently conforming to the dehumanizing routine of an orphanage inmate, he established his identity and retained his dignity by telling himself he was unique. He was not like the other 1,147 inmates at Hanwell. C*H*A*R*L*I*E C*H*A*P*L*I*N (fascinating letters he was learning to spell and write for the first time) already was the most famous actor in the world. A direct descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles II, he was invulnerable.3
Ironically, it was a belated visit from the original source of inspiration for those dreams of grandeur that broke Charlie’s heart and actually threatened to shatter his feelings of invulnerability. Admitted on June 18, 1896, Chaplin did not see his mother until August 10, 1897. Hanwell stood twelve miles outside London. Time and again, during those first thirteen months of what he later labeled “my incarceration,” whenever he pictured his mother in his mind’s eye, the homesick boy always saw glamorous Lily. Time and again he described the beautiful actress to his fellow inmates. And so, when the drastically aged and bedraggled Hannah Chaplin finally showed up on visiting day, Charlie was shocked and mortified. A close friend and confidant, Harry Crocker, recalled:
It was his realization of the extreme poverty of the family which threw him into an absolute panic of self-consciousness and moral despair. “My poor mother!” he sighed. “Upon certain occasions even she caused me anguished embarrassment. What a traitor to her I felt! But my consciousness of poverty was too overwhelming! She came to the institution one day — she had been a very good-looking woman, a beautiful woman … but … she never recovered her looks, and she couldn’t afford to dress well.… she came with an oil can — she’d been shopping — and the association of her with the oil can as my mother, and all the boys seeing her was too much. I cried: ‘Why do you come with that mother?’ I sobbed, pointing to the oil can. ‘Why do you come at all? They’ll see you, they’ll all see you.’ I shed terribly bitter tears.” Charlie writhed at the memory.4
Understandably, Chaplin completely revised that orphanage memory in My Autobiography; just as he entirely omitted any mention of his mother’s relationship with Leo Dryden, modified the story of her contretemps with the immigration authorities, and touched up a number of other embarrassing facts and painful memories. My Autobiography was written in six drafts over eight years. After finishing the sixth version, Chaplin spent another year editing out the bitterness. (As he put it, there was a lot of bitterness.)
So what was daily life at Hanwell really like for children at risk in 1896? Anthony J. Mundella, M.P., a Liberal politician and social reformer who chaired a parliamentary committee investigating conditions at Hanwell and other “barrack schools,” addressed that question in a report he published the year Charlie was admitted. According to his report, there was no deliberate cruelty, little severe physical hardship, and plenty of discomfort.
Hanwell consisted of 136 acres of grounds with buildings on 20 acres. The inmates slept in dormitories with twenty-two to forty-nine beds per room. Each child was allotted the rough equivalent of a six-by-six-foot area of floor space. Clothes were kept in baskets that hung from the foot of iron beds. The bedding afforded adequate warmth, but the dormitories and washrooms were sometimes poorly heated. The lack of fresh air throughout the entire school resulted in a pervasive and distinctive smell of overcrowded bodies and general stuffiness. One whiff of that familiar odor triggered a flashback that staggered Chaplin when he revisited Hanwell in 1931. Returning to his suite at the Carlton, his emotional memories jogged by that long-forgotten aroma as if by a Proustian madeleine, Charlie wept like a child (and for a child) for nearly an hour.
Each inmate had been issued flannel underclothes, a school uniform, and heavy, stiff boots that were worn all day, all year round. Mundella wrote:
One of the reasons why the children were not sent out of doors more frequently is that they are not sufficiently provided with outdoor clothing.… we have ourselves seen the children in the yards too thinly clad and suffering from colds and chilblains. It appears to be considered unnecessary to supply the children with extra clothing unless they go beyond the school precincts, and yet in the yards, which are often draughty and sunless, and in which there is little inducement to play, the children need more warmth than if they were walking briskly.5
There were separate living quarters, separate playgrounds, separate water fountains, and separate libraries for the older inmates of each sex, with a common dining room, an outdoor swimming pool, and an infants’ school for children under seven, to which Charlie was admitted for the first few months because of his small size. Infants who misbehaved were punished by standing in a corner or in front of the class for “half an hour or so.” Older boys received a few strokes of the cane for “repeated disobedience, dirty habits and bad language.”6
While their overall conclusion was that the Hanwell inmates were somewhat subdued and apathetic, the Mundella Committee did not consider the mild mental dullness they observed a direct result of cruel or unusual punishment, chronic hunger, or low-grade starvation. Compared to their better-fed and better-dressed counterparts in traditional English boarding schools and working-class homes, Hanwell children lived in spartan conditions. Compared to the barefoot and shivering children sleeping in doorways and under the arches of the streets of London, life at Hanwell may well have been almost utopian.
“Even the teachers suffer from mental depression due to the dull monotony and want of mental life in the whole establishment,” the Mundella report concluded. “Undoubtedly the general tendency of living in the school is to, as it were, run all our children in a mould.” As Chaplin recalled it, “we marched in military order from class to class, and to and from meals.”7
As a seven-year-old, Charlie received three ounces of meat a day, a pint of milk, and enormous amounts of starch — about twelve ounces of bread and four ounces of potatoes. The diet “leads to overfeeding on the one hand and … malnutrition on the other.”8 But thanks to Charles Dickens and his fictional counterpart Oliver Twist, in 1896 it was entirely permissible for Hanwell inmates to ask for “more.” Like Chaplin, both Dickens (age twelve at the Marshalsea) and Hogarth (age ten at the Fleet Street Debtor’s Prison) were children of impecunious parents; each later brilliantly satirized his residual childhood feelings about “the system” in his respective art form.
What role did Chaplin’s encounter with “the system” later play in shaping his comic vision? It left him — as it had Dickens — with a sense of burning indignation toward established authority. In his novels, Dickens’s residual feelings of outrage and wounded pride took the form of satirical ridicule of the social system, what one critic, Walter Bagehot, referred to as his “sentimental radicalism.” In his films, Chaplin’s feelings of resentment toward the Hanwell system of law and order took the form of what the critic Robert Benchley dubbed “Charlie’s asskicking humor.”9 Benchley was specifically referring to those old slapstick one- and two-reelers in which moviegoers of all nations vicariously delighted in the universally intelligible silent film spectacle of physically intimidating authority figures and massive bullies receiving well-aimed and well-deserved kicks in the pants from Charlie’s pint-sized Little Tramp.
While it was behemoths like Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, big-bellied Mack Swain, and mountainous Eric Campbell whose heavy haunches served as the Little Tramp’s favorite targets, it takes scant stretch of the imagination to reinsert a mighty two-hundred-pound giant by the name of Captain Hindrum into his rightful place in the rogues’ gallery of Charlie Chaplin’s childhood imagination.
Every Friday — Punishment Day —the ex-naval officer dispensed Hanwell justice in an elaborately choreographed ritual purposely designed to instill unquestioning obedience in the abject inmates. “There was a sadistic streak in the old Captain and his fury and brutality in administration of his punitive duties were a horrible thing to witness,” Chaplin recalled.
At ten o’clock we marched in order into the huge, gloomy armory with monotonous gray walls. We were left to stand at silent attention, staring at the implements of torture — a vaulting horse, an easel with straps upon which hung the cane, the birch and the cat. After a half hour of suspense and anticipation of the horror to come, there entered solemnly the doctor, a master, two assistants and the dread Captain Hindrum, the disciplinarian.10
Striding up to a spread-eagled victim whose trousers were down and buttocks exposed with his wrists strapped to the vaulting horse, with the swoosh of “a cane as thick as a man’s thumb” Hindrum left “three pink welts as wide as a washerwoman’s finger across his bottom,” while the entire assemblage of five hundred boys looked on in terrified amazement.11 By no means a defiant or rebellious child in spite of his growing contempt for authority, Charlie managed to suffer only one unjust flogging, which left a more indelible impression on his mind than on his bottom. “They tried to break my spirit at Hanwell,” he recalled, but “they never succeeded.”12
Before entering Hanwell, Charlie had been a carefree child roaming the streets of South London with virtually no adult supervision. While Hannah Chaplin now sewed ten to twelve hours a day, streetwise Syd kept an eye on his kid brother and taught him the ropes:
I was about five, and Syd nine.… In our street there was a book shop with an outside shelf of bargain books.… “Gee,” said Syd, “let’s get some of those. You go and get some and bring them around the corner.”… the proprietor failed to notice me and I had the wild exhilaration of success of theft. Syd congratulated me and piled the books up evenly against the wall… . after a second armful… I essayed a third pilfering expedition but luck deserted me. Through the window I felt the eye of the proprietor upon me, but I was fascinated and could not stop. He came out… just as I was making off with the third load.… I’ll never forget it, Syd was lying beside our collection … with a small stick, whistling as he played the stick like a flute. And I arrived with the shopkeeper.13
After calling a “rozzer,” who scared the hell out of the boys, the kindly shopkeeper and the amused bobby let them off with a stern warning and a free book apiece.
It would not be surprising if that good-natured bobby later turned up in Chaplin’s cinematic imagination as the smiling comic policeman who crosses paths with Jackie, the pint-sized hustler in the first window-breaking scene early in The Kid. And it is also likely that Charlie and Syd’s boyhood game of book snatching was replayed in 1918 as that food-snitching game at a Lambeth-looking food stall in A Dog’s Life, in which the two Chaplin brothers nostalgically reprised a slightly modified version of their original childhood caper. In that same film, streetwise Charlie (the screen character) also succeeds in nicking a wallet in an extended gag sequence that was an in-joke between himself and Syd, alluding to Syd’s experience of “finding” a purse with seven gold sovereigns while peddling papers on a London bus. Syd’s lucky “find” was used to finance the one and only seaside holiday their family ever took. Instead of confronting Syd with her suspicions, Lily set her scruples aside by telling herself “God had sent it as a blessing from Heaven.”14
Not only were the two brothers less than fully law-abiding citizens before entering the orphanage, but Charlie had never been really scared by any adult authority figure before he met Captain Hindrum. A former upstairs neighbor recalled:
In those days I had a room in Walcot Gardens. In the evenings when we were trying to work, the kids in the court below used to make such a hubbub that we could not get on. When I looked out, there was that lad … with an audience around him. I used to jump down flights of stairs furious, and then I would listen. The boy was the most marvelous mimic I ever saw.
When he saw me, he would say “Ladies and gentleman, a slight impression of the bloke upstairs who comes down to chase us,” and as I listened my face grew red and I knew the kid was a genius.… He thought no one who ever lived was like his mother. The lad thought she was the cleverest player in the world, a great lady and his ideal.15
The crime Charlie was accused of, and said he never committed, was arson. Some other kids had set scraps of papers on fire in the lavatory when Charlie happened to be there. Unable to refute the circumstantial evidence against him, unwilling to peach, and disinclined to risk more severe punishment by protesting unsuccessfully, the young Charlie pleaded guilty and took the beating.
As for the crime: while fire setting may seem like a harmless prank, twenty-six children had perished in a fire in the orphanage in 1889, just seven years earlier. As for the punishment: flogging was then a universal practice that transcended all social classes, from the hallowed halls of Eton to the meanest charity orphanage. Throughout the nineteenth century, corporal punishment was a standard form of child discipline in English institutions. But while the Mundella Committee considered a few strokes of the cane a mild rebuke for bad behavior, for Charlie it was an experience with authority he never forgot or forgave.
One reason why Chaplin’s screen character’s ass-kicking antics in those early films were so immensely popular with early-twentieth-century moviegoers is that they resonated unconsciously with his audiences’ personal experiences with that universal child-rearing practice. Playing to a generation whose rumpas and dumpas, fannies and tushies, bottoms and bums had all known the sting of authority, Charlie made them laugh until their sides split. Given our current penchant for gentler forms of child discipline, it is not surprising that the Little Tramp’s crude comic antics have lost much of their freshness and charm for twenty-first-century audiences. In fact it would not be surprising if many of today’s parents would strenuously object to their children viewing many of those early one- and two-reelers that first made Chaplin world famous by 1915, because they contain too much of what is known in modern educational parlance as gratuitous violence.
But if Charlie Chaplin’s early comedies now seem primitive and outdated, his comic character has managed to endure thus far as an archetypal figure who has already joined the immortal ranks of characters like Falstaff and Don Quixote. For the deepest message beneath all of the Little Tramp’s slapstick antics was and is to give as good as you get: when kicked in the pants by life’s indignities, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, hang on to your self-respect, and repay the compliment in full measure. Or as Chaplin put it in 1925: “The whole point of The Little Fellow is that no matter how down on his ass he is, no matter how well the jackals succeed in tearing him apart, he’s still a man of dignity.”16
While it would be absurd to suggest that the mature Chaplin’s hard-knocks credo had fully developed by the time the eight-and-a-half-year-old boy left the orphanage to rejoin his mother, there is every reason to believe that the seeds of his survival philosophy and Charlie’s coping mechanism — using his creative imagination to deal with adversity — had both been firmly planted and were beginning to take root.