Work

Brown began this in 1852 and did not finish it for 13 years, and it is his great attempt to fit the whole idea of Victorian labor into a single street. The scene is Heath Street in Hampstead, in north London, torn up by navvies digging a trench for new water mains. Around these muscular workmen Brown arranges every social layer, the rich passing on horseback, the ragged poor, an orphaned family, a pair of sandwich-board men. Off to the right two well-dressed men watch and do nothing, and they are portraits of real thinkers, the writer Thomas Carlyle and the clergyman F. D. Maurice, included as men who labor with their minds. Brown wrote long notes explaining every figure when the picture was finally shown.