According to Frances Carey, Deputy Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, the painting shows the destruction of Babylon and the material world by natural cataclysm.

[4] Michael Freeman, Supernumerary Fellow and Lecturer in Human Geography at Mansfield College, describes the painting as follows:[9] Storms and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and other natural disasters 'swept like tidal waves through early nineteenth-century periodicals, broadsheets and panoramas'.

This was ... powerfully demonstrated in The Great Day of his Wrath (1852), in which the Edinburgh of James Hutton, with its grand citadel, hilltop terraces and spectacular volcanic landscape, explodes outwards and appears suspended upside-down, flags still flying from its buildings and before crashing head-on into the valley below.According to the Tate Gallery, the United Kingdom's national museum of British and Modern Art, the painting closely follows a portion of Revelation 6, a chapter from the New Testament of the Bible:[10] And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

Based on this comment, F. D. Klingender argued that this image was in fact a "disguised response to the industrial scene", a claim Charles F. Stuckey is skeptical of.

[13] After Martin's death, his last pictures (including The End of the World) were exhibited in "London and the chief cities in England attracting great crowds".