The painting attempts to portray, both literally and analytically, the totality of the Victorian social system and the transition from a rural to an urban economy.

It is closely similar, though for the lady with a blue parasol the face of Maria Leathart, the commissioner's wife, replaces that of Mrs Brown in the Manchester version.

Brown explained that he had intended to demonstrate that the modern British workman could be as fit a subject for art as the more supposedly picturesque Italian lazarone (literally, the "mob," used to refer to the street people of Naples).

Brown's principal artistic model was the work of William Hogarth, in particular his paintings Humours of an Election and his prints Beer Street and Gin Lane.

The Election paintings depicted both the vitality and the corruption of British society, while the prints set up a contrast between poverty and prosperity.

The rustic aspects of the composition draw on the established tradition of the picturesque, epitomised by the work of artists such as John Constable and William Collins.

The satirical and critical aspects of Hogarth's style work in tandem with Brown's Pre-Raphaelitism, with its intense concentration on the complication of the pictorial surface in conflicting details.

This image of potentially violent and jarring confrontation is set in opposition to the social harmony and deference epitomised by the picturesque tradition.

The sheet floating in front of him is a copy of a religious tract handed to him by the lady in the blue bonnet at the left, who is attempting to evangelise the navvies.

The ragged character on the left in front of the fashionable lady represents the opposite end of the social scale: an itinerant chickweed seller who lives in a flophouse in Flower and Dean Street, Whitechapel, the most notoriously criminalised part of London at the time.

[7] All these figures are passing by the workers along a narrow pathway which brings them up against the sifted lime powder, a corrosive which symbolises the cleansing assault on their complacent rejection of useful work.

He is holding a brick-hod and drinking beer supplied by the man in the red waistcoat who is supposed to be a "bouncer" employed in a local pub.

Brown's description emphasises this challenge by suddenly moving from a first-person narrative to the second person – speaking to his fictional fashionable lady about the perilous situation of the impoverished children.

Beneath these figures on the road children can be seen playing, while genteel couples and sandwich-board carriers wander through the sun-dappled lower street.

At the extreme right a policeman pushes a female orange seller who is resting her basket on a bollard (technically illegal, because she is setting up shop).

Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work!

Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves.

[8]In the same book Carlyle creates the character of Bobus Higgins, a corrupt sausage maker who uses horsemeat in his product to undercut competitors.

Finally on the upper central portion of the painting there is a large hunting dog owned by the most wealthy upper-class man and woman on the horses.

But they are pushed to the back, stuck and unable to progress – forced into the shade in the background, while the workers occupy the brightly lit foreground.

As with most Pre-Raphaelite paintings the composition minimises chiaroscuro and accumulates motifs in deliberately confusing abundance, containing numerous Hogarthian sub-episodes within the main image (a man washing windows; a dog worrying horses leading a carriage etc.).