From the Lambeth Workhouse to Silent-Film Legend

Charlie Chaplin was born in London in the late 1880s into a family that was soon in difficulty. His parents separated when he was three. His mother, who had a mental illness, struggled to support her children, and over roughly a decade Chaplin moved in and out of the Lambeth Workhouse, a London institution for destitute people. The Smithsonian Magazine article does not say how many times he entered.

He later wrote about the first arrival, in the 1890s, when he and his brother Sydney were separated from their mother. He remembered a forlorn bewilderment. On a visiting day some days later, he recalled the shock of seeing her come into the visiting room dressed in workhouse clothes. In his words, in one week she had aged and grown thin, but her face lit up when she saw the boys.

In 1904, when Chaplin was 14, he brought his mother to the workhouse. A letter from the family says she had an extreme mental disorder, and she was sent to an asylum. She spent most of her remaining years in psychiatric care.

The article connects these years to the character Chaplin later created, the Little Tramp, a sympathetic outsider who is never crushed by life's blows. He became one of the most celebrated filmmakers in cinema history.

The piece itself is about a campaign. The Cinema Museum, which covers cinema history from the 1890s to today, occupies the former Lambeth Workhouse. The building belongs to the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, which planned to sell it when the museum's lease ended in March 2018. A petition with more than 22,800 signatures asked the Trust to secure the museum's future, and five members of the Chaplin family signed an open letter calling the museum the nearest thing Britain has to a Chaplin Museum.