Ford Madox Brown's Work: An Iconographic Analysis

Ford Madox Brown's Work: An Iconographic AnalysisAuthor(s): Gerard CurtisSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 623-636Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045914 .Accessed: 15/06/2014 13:38

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Ford Madox Brown's Work: An Iconographic Analysis Gerard Curtis

Ford Madox Brown's Work (Manchester City Art Gallery, Fig. 1), begun in 1852 and ostensibly completed by 1863, is

currently held to be an outstanding commentary on contem-

porary Victorian socio-political concerns. Its main theme, that of the ennobling nature of work, is extrapolated from one of Brown's favorite books, Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present.' In Work Brown presented Carlyle's stratification of labor in visual terms. Central to the composition is manual labor. To the right, standing by the railing, are, to use Brown's term, two "brainworkers": Thomas Carlyle, and beside him, Bible in hand, F. D. Maurice.2 Completing the scene are the unemployed, street sellers who have never been taught to work, and the idle rich who live off other men's labors.3

The purpose of this article is twofold. One is to examine the importance of the physical labor being done in the

painting (the work in Work) in the light of contemporary Victorian sensibilities and social concerns. The other purpose is to examine Brown's use of semiotic detailing, and the

relationship between the iconography and the literary allusions in the painting. In an age rich in a "literacy" of both visual and textual signs, Brown's semiotic detailing relates to a fundamental Victorian tenet: the desire to conflate social realism and social idealism. An understanding of these concerns reveals the full complexity of Brown's talents, and

particularly an awareness of his ability to make, as his

granddaughter Helen Madox Rossetti noted, "every inch of... [a] canvas pregnant with meaning and thought... and not the smallest detail has been considered nnworthy [swc] of

thought and deep study."'4 In Past and Present, Carlyle uses an extended metaphor to

describe the benefits of true physical labor to society; he likens it to "... a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble

force .. . like an ever-widening river there, it runs and

flows;-draining off the sour festering water ... making, instead of a pestilent swamp, a green fruitful meadow, with its clear flowing stream . . . Let the stream and zts value be

great or small."5 In this painting Brown portrays labor in a visual metaphor analogous to Carlyle's flowing stream, for the work portrayed is, as Brown quite specifically states, that connected with the "supplying of water," the installation of a waterworks main.6 This construction is both the focus of Brown's painting and central to its moral and social narrative.

Such installations were, by mid-century, becoming a common form of street excavation in urban England-and it was

just such a scene, in Brown's home borough of Hampstead, that inspired him to its "plein air" depiction. Some confusion has existed, however, over the type of construction Brown

actually depicted.7 E. L. Richard and Mary Bennett both believe that Brown is depicting a sewer line. However, the

only likely sewer lines for the Hampstead area were not constructed till much later than the painting's execution, in the late 1850s and early sixties. The excavations Brown witnessed were those undertaken, after an enabling act of

1852, by the New River Company. Aptly named in light of

Carlyle's metaphor of a new cleaning stream of labor, the New River Company began expansion work during 1852-53 to connect a planned reservoir on The Mount to Hampstead proper. The reservoir, completed in 1856, is still extant; its location is behind the buildings shown at the left of Brown's

painting. Beyond Brown's recondite punning on the New River Company and Carlyle's "new stream," the importance and symbolic significance of this specific type of labor would not have been lost on a socially conscious Victorian viewer. Nor would it have been lost on the lower classes who literally lived in Carlyle's metaphoric "pestilent swamp"-swamps of

I am indebted to Dr. David Bershad and Dr. Joseph Polzer for their initial encouragement and criticism of this essay; Dr. Sarah Symmons Goubert, John Hatch, Maria Beston, Mary Bennett, the anonymous reader, and particularly Chris Short offered valuable insights and commented on various drafts of the paper. I Ford Madox Hueffer, Brown's grandson, noted that "the Carlylean motzf of the picture is indeed so obvious that it is scarcely necessary to mention it." Hueffer also noted that passages in Brown's own copy of Past and Present, particularly those "enunciating the gospel of WORK," were pencil-marked. Both quotations are from Hueffer, 195; see also pp. 94, and 414-415. 2 Brown, The Exhibation of Work and Other Pazntings by Ford Madox Brown at the Gallery, 191 Piccadzlly, exh. cat.; repr. in part in J. Treuherz Pre-Raphaelite Pazntzngs from the Manchester City Gallery, London, 1980, repr., with additions and changes, in Hueffer's Ford Madox Brown. All future references are to the original. 3 See Johnson. 4 H. M. Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, exh. cat., Committee of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, n.p., 1902, 13.

Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, London, n.d., 149.

6 Brown, 1865, 27. 7 E. L. Richard, a civil engineer, and Mary Bennett (quoting E. L. Richard and F. M. L. Thompson) believe that Brown actually depicts a sewer line (see M. Bennett, "Work," in The Pre-Raphaelites, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1984, 163; and A. Grieve, The Art of Dante Gabrzel Rossetti, Norwich, 1976, 44, n. 70). However, the only likely sewer lines for the Hampstead area were not constructed till much later, in the late 1850s and early sixties. Bernard Rudden in The New River, Oxford, 1985, and F. M. L. Thompson in Hampstead, Budldzng a Borough, London, 1974, 393, give specific evidence of water-main construction from 1852 onwards in this area of Hampstead, as part of an extensive expansion plan by the New River Company. E. L. Richard himself notes (letter, June 18, 1979, Manchester City Gallery Archives) a date of around 1859 or before for construction in the area for the Fleet Sewer, and a date of 1859 and after for the connecting sewer line at Hampstead. Thompson (who seems confused over Work's dates) notes that sewer line plans were drawn up in 1857, with construction in the 1860s (pp. 401-403 and 267-268)-dates well after the initial designs of Work. Brown himself clearly states that "At that time extensive excavations, connected with the supply of water, were going on in the neighbourhood..." (Brown, 1865, 27), and his concern for accuracy was such that he duplicated the open pit in his backyard.


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624 THE ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NUMBER 4

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1 Ford Madox Brown, Work, 137 x 197.3 cm. Manchester, Manchester City Art Gallery (copyright Art Gallery)

backyard cesspools, rotting garbage and manure, and open sewers, with no water to flush the effluent away.8 Signifi- cantly, Brown himself was living in a condition of "extreme

poverty" on High Street in Hampstead in the 1850s, near the scene of Work.9

Nineteenth-century social reformers felt that a fresh water

supply, and the regulation of the various water companies, was the key issue in alleviating the hardship, drunkenness, and social isolation suffered by those classes given the

derogatory title, "The Great Unwashed." F. D. Maurice gave public lectures on the relationship between godliness and

cleanliness, as Carlyle had done in Past and Present. As one reformer put it: "Our motto must be 'continuous supply, uniform rates, and universal filtration!' "10

Sanitation and water reform were also central issues for

writers, scientists, and artists; it was a dominant theme in Dickens's Bleak House, which was published during the years 1852-53, and a number of articles he published in both Household Words in the 1850s and All the Year Round." It was a

central issue, as well, in Thomas Mayhew's articles and letters in the Morning Chronicle and in his London Labour and the London Poor. The noted scientist Michael Faraday wrote a letter to The Times on July 7, 1855, calling for water reform via a clean-up of the Thames. And from the 1830s to the 1840s Brown's associate, the painterJohn Martin, published pamphlets with his own proposals for sewage, water systems, and metropolitan improvements.12 J. M. W. Turner (who was

greatly admired by Brown) sat on the board of 1830 investi-

gating these improvements and the need for a reliable and

pure source of water for London. Brown, a man of socialist

leanings and "socialistic twinge[s]," was himself involved in a number of reform activities, and would have been keenly aware of the growing lower-class agitation for water reform-

probably one of the central reform issues of the period.13

8As Punch noted in 1854, London was not the healthiest city to live in: "In every street is a yawning sewer../... The River runs stinking.../ (The fever fiend may come to the door...)"; "The One Power," Punch, xxvii, 1854, 102.

9 Brown, 1981, 78, n. 20. 10 "The Troubled Water Question," Household Words, I, Apr. 13, 1850, 54.

I I Ibid., "The Water-drops," Household Words, I, Aug. 1850, 482-489; "Good Water," All the Year Round, Mar. 31, 1860, 530-532; "London Water," All the Year Round, Nov. 2, 1861, 137-140, 150-153; also see

Johnson, 149. 12 William Feaver in The Art of John Martin, London, 1975, notes that Martin encouraged Brown early in his career, and that Brown later

complained of Martin's exclusion from the 1887 Jubilee Exhibition (p. 204). Brown was also the friend of J. F. Martin, the genre painter, and this has led to some confusion as to which John Martin he may be referring to in his diary entries. 13 Hueffer, 191. See also Hueffer's references to Brown's social welfare activities on pp. 172, 376, and 382, n. 1.



FORD MADOX BROWN'S WORK: AN ICONOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS 625

-C II

A COURT FOR KING CHOLERA. 2 John Leech, A Court for King Cholera, in Punch, xxIII, Sept. 25, 1852, 139 (photo: author)

Brown would also have been aware of the large body of

graphic works that gave voice to this concern over the "water

question," such as John Leech's illustration in Punch, A Court

for King Cholera, 1852 (Fig. 2).14 Of primary importance to reformers were the links be-

tween cleanliness, water supply, and cholera. Epidemics of cholera occurred throughout the 1830s, forties, and fifties;

during the years 1853 to 1854, while Brown was designing the composition of Work, 11,000 individuals in London alone died in a major cholera outbreak. At this time there occur a number of references to the disease in Brown's diaries: "Heard from him [Cave Thomas] some curious details of the Cholera which raged furiously round his two streets but did not molest them. Bodies taken from Middlesex Hospitals in vans. In the pest-stricken streets groops (sic) of women and children frantic for their relations taken off. Police and others with stretchers running about. Undertakers as common as other people in the streets . . . Hearses with coffins outside as well as in."15 On September 12, 1854, he worried about the possibility of catching cholera from drinking beer; on September 10 he mentioned finding cholera rampant throughout the Hampstead area. On August 26 he also recorded his concerns regarding the possibility of his young daughter catching the contagion.16 At the same time, his diaries indicate his extreme fastidiousness about cleanliness

(a rather rare virtue for his time); he often bathed once a day and noted those times when he missed a bath.

The debate on cholera and its relationship to cleanliness and water supply was not an issue reserved solely for the attention of health specialists and medical reformers. The public press listed cholera preventatives and gave daily tabulations of cholera deaths, as well as publishing open letters from researchers relating the links between

healthy water supply and cholera eradication. In a letter to The Times on September 29, 1849, Dr. William Budd, the noted

germ and fungal theorist, demanded that "the people of in- fected districts be supplied with water from healthy quarters.

Budd, along with Dr. John Snow, publicly advocated a

theory of germ contagion versus the then more commonly held miasmic theory of effluent odors. Miasmic theory held that the primary source of cholera and fever was in particles of disease carried by poisonous odors from the rotting mass in swamps, unflushed sewers, cesspools, and contaminated water. Crucial to both theories, however, was the belief that

only a fresh water supply would alleviate cholera, disease, and suffering. Brown, himself the grandson of the noted medical reformer Dr. John Brown, indicated in his journal some belief in the miasmic theory of contagion.17

Throughout September of 1854, The Times carried a

number of articles on cholera preventatives, and presented tabulated lists of cholera deaths. On October 1, 1854, Brown recorded in his diaries that it was cholera that awakened in him a long-dormant sense of Christian charity. The painter contributed to a fund for children, whom he called "cholera

14 Punch, xxIII, Sept. 25, 1852, 139. Other notable examples of this graphic tradition are Water! Water! Everywhere; and not a drop to drink, Punch, xviI, 1849, 137; Faraday Giving His card to Father Thames, Punch, July 21, 1855, 27; Thames and His Tributary, Punch, XLI, 1861, 147; and Breeding Place for Cholera, Penny Illustrated Paper, ix, Oct. 21, 1865, 328. 15 Oct. 7, 1854, Brown, 1981, 99-100.

16 Brown, 1981, 91, 90, 87. See also p. 97. 17 Brown, 1981, 90. Dr. John Brown (of whom there is a portrait by William Blake) advocated reforms in the treatment of physiological illness (through diet) and psychological disorders (through stimulants): see W. D. Paden, "The Ancestry and Families of Ford Madox Brown," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Autumn, 1967, 124-135.




parentless brats," orphaned by the ravages of the disease caused by contaminated water. In Work one observes a group of orphaned "ragged dirty brats," as Brown called them in his 1865 commentary on the painting, standing before the water-main pit.18 Their orphaned state is indicated, as Brown further noted, through the black ribbon on the baby's arm. Their mother had died of an unspecified cause-but

probably cholera. As William Johnston noted, in his two- volume report of 1851, England as It Is, the leading cause of "widowhood ... [and] destitute orphanage" was endemic disease caused by poor water supply.19 The orphans' father had forsaken them, Brown stated, for alcohol. These chil-

dren, who stand before the water pit, represent the toll of cholera, disease, impure water, and, significantly, alcohol, on

working-class families and their innocent offspring. They may also represent Brown's concerns in 1854 for his own children catching the disease, or, more specifically, his anxieties over his wife catching cholera: she became ill after a servant contracted the contagion on Sunday, September 10, 1854. The cholera plagues and Brown's concerns for his

family, for orphaned children, and for sanitary reform-all add iconographic significance to his post-1854 compositional designs for Work.

In a famous caricature of 1828 entitled Salus Populi Suprema Lex (British Museum, Fig. 3) done by Brown's

contemporary and acquaintance, George Cruikshank, one finds expressed the widespread contempt for those water

companies that supplied cholera-infested and contaminated water to the populace of London.20 In this caricature it is the Southwark Company, drawing upon the festering Thames for its supposedly clean water, that is held up to condemna- tion. Indeed, in Hampstead, where Brown lived, and began the composition of Work, complaints were made against the

Hampstead Water Company. In a letter to The Times of

August 26, 1854, a resident questioned how one could be

expected to follow the Board of Health's recommendations

citing cleanliness as a preventative for cholera, when he himself could not obtain a regular supply of water from this same company, and its water was in any case "notorious for its impurity." The complainant does, however, have high praise for the supply of water provided by the New River

Company, the rival of the Hampstead Company, and the

company whose excavations were the basis of Brown's painting. Contemporary accounts indicate that the New River

Company water consumers suffered less risk of catching cholera because of the better quality of water supplied.2'

Beyond just cleanliness, a further burden on the lower classes was the intermittent supply of water. In some parts of London, water was only available for a half hour in the early morning or evening, and not at all on Sundays. Even the New River Company failed to provide regular supplies until 1899.

In the background right of Brown's painting, in the very middle of the road, stand two young girls, water jugs in hand, in the process of obtaining water. At this time, women and children would walk a quarter of a mile or more to a public conduit for water. Upon reaching the standpipe, they would line up and then have to pay, by the jug or pailfull, for the water acquired-as was the case in Hampstead, as seen in The Penny Illustrated Paper of Oct. 21, 1865, 328 (Fig. 4: both this engraving and Work show the use of similar water jugs). In some areas of England the price of supposedly fresh water was, as the noted sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick stated, as much as the cost of strong beer-and beer was more

readily available.22 In the 1820s and thirties the East London Waterworks Company boasted that it would soon be provid- ing water as "cheap as beer"; but beyond mere boasting and

self-aggrandizement, the over-all reduction in water costs was still minimal by mid-century.23

It is, in turn, the relationship of alcohol and temperance to fresh water supply that Brown further addresses in his water-main image. In a contemporary complaint by a Bat- tersea resident, the question is raised as to why it should "be a sin for a turncock to turn on the water during the same hours as the potman cries his beer" (The Tzmes, August 29, 1854). In the light of this complaint, one notes that central to Brown's composition-and behind the children orphaned by disease and alcohol-is just such a potman, his Times under his arm. Brown tells us that the potman was himself "stunted with gin" as a boy; thus he is a visual reminder of the

physical effects of alcohol on young children.24 He stands before the water-main excavation in the act of crying out "Beer!" while the two young girls in the background head off, probably to wait for the distant standpipe to open.

Mary Gilles stated, in her tract of 1847 entitled A Labourer's Home, that whole families often turned to beer consumption for the very reason that it was more readily available, and

purer, then the water from butts, wells, or standpipes.25 In a

story with striking parallels to Brown's own account of the

orphans shown in Work, Gilles's tract presents a tale in which the lack of fresh water leads to a group of children being orphaned. Their mother dies of fever, caught from the

stagnant water, while their father abandons them for alcohol. Hector Gavin, in his humorously entitled text Sanitary Ramblings (1848), reiterates this point. He relates disease and alcoholism among the working and destitute classes to the water supply. What Brown himself comprehended, and

visually represented in Work, is that it was only through the

provision of fresh and readily available water, as his portrayal of a water-main excavation indicates, that moderation and

temperance were possible. As E. D. H. Johnson has noted, there are also overtones of

Hogarth's famous illustrations of Gin Lane (1750-51) and

18 Brown, 1865, 29. Mentioned as "ragged, dirty children" as well, same page. 19 W. Johnston, England as It Is: Political, Soczal, and Industrzal zn the Middle of the 19th-Century, facs. repr. of 1851 ed., 2 vols., Shannon, Ireland, 1971, II, 306. 20 Hueffer, 38, mentions Brown's acquaintance with Cruikshank. 21 See Rudden (as in n. 7), 153, 157, and 160. 22 E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condztzon ofthe Labourzng Populatzon of Great Brztazn, 1842, ed. M. W. Flinn, Edinburgh, 1965, 141-142.

Chadwick mentions payment by the pail in the Hampstead area. As water policy did not change dramatically around mid-century, such payments would have continued well into the 1850s and sixties. In one part of England the cost of a pail of water is recorded as three half-pence (p. 142). 23 Rudden (as in n. 7), 140. 24 Brown, 1865, 30. 25 M. Gilles, "A Labourer's Home," Howitt's Journal, 1847, 61-64; repr. in L. James, Prznt and the People: 1819-1851, London, 1978, 177-182.




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ROYAL ADDRESS Ior

CADWALLADER AP-TUDOR Ar-EDWARDS AP-VAUGHAN, WATER-KING OF SOUTHWARK,

SOVEREIGN OF THE SCENTED STREAMS,-AUTOGRAT OF ALL THE SLUSUES,-RAINING PRINCE OF THE GOLDEN SHOWERS, PROTECTOR OF THE CONFEDERATION OF THE (U)RHINE,-APPROPRIATOR OF THE DIET OF WORMS,

PALATINE OF THE LOWER ISSUES,-MAR-CRAVE OF OFFALS,-LORD OF THE STRAY OILS,-AGITATOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE INTESTINAL CANALS, NIGHT-CHAIR-MAN OF THE BOARD OF FLUX-IONS,-LORD OF THEMAN-URE OF SHETLAND,-WARDEN OF THE SINK PORTS,

RECEIVER GENERAL AND DfSTRIBUTOR OF SEWERS,-GRAND CROSS OF THE MOST MUDDY ORDURE OF THE BA8., AND REPRESENTATIVE IN THE IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT FOR WELL,

TO HIS SJUBJECTg OF THE BOROUJitH. My People of Southwark ! your Monarch addresses you, And deigns to declare, that with pride he possesses you, Yet shudders to hear of the shocking excesses you

Project in the cause of Reform : Reformation by Land, he is told, will not quiet you, But a Water-Reform, both in Washing and Diet, you Insist on effecting, or kick up a riot you

Will-and a terrible storm ! (1.) As your King, I demand-What the deuce can the matter be ? What can the meaning of all this loud clatter be! What would ye insinuate can in the Watter be,

Except what it ought to contain ? Such as small living creatures, and large ones deceas'd, The liquefied bodies of man and of beast, Sluic'd with saucefrom the sewers, in all quite a feast,

And yet you presume to complain ! Oh ! how couldyou dream there was any thing vicious in matter putrescent, or excrementitious, Or refuse of gas-works, that poisons the fishes,

Which rot in the water you drink? Nay! chop me no logic, nor say that it follows That a man must be poisond if poison he swallows, As sure as a sow must be daub'd when she wallows

In the mire of a puddle or sink.

For a wholesomer fluid can't be, to my thinking, Since it serves you at once both for eating and drinking Then gobble it down, my good Folk! without shrinking.

Why es-chew what has chew'd been before? Your minds first of prejudice nobly divesting, That'tis good for weak stomachs you'll own is past question,(2.) Having already gone through a course of digestion,

In whole or in part-less or more.

Just between SOUTHWARK Bridge, and its NEw LON6oN brother, Three Crane Wharf on one side, Horse Shoe Alley on t'other, You may scent out THEa SPOT-there is aot such another-

(Should such vain curiosity seize you) Where I pump up the streamrn all your wants to supply; No other you get but what drops from the sky, And if it won't suit you, you needs must go dry:

I despair to make water to please you.

For the use of your Hospuals look a my lquor Oh, pray do not fancy it makes the sick sicker, Though in brewing arises a scum that is thicker

Than if meat had been boiled in the copper; (3.) And though in the bath, when prescribed for your good, If diseased in your bowels, your nerves, or your blood, You find yourself stuck in a mass of my mud,

For your health it is all very proper. The dolts of the City conceive it a virtue, To transfer from their dwellings all things that are dirty, To the great Common Sewers-a hundred and thirty,-

And plump in my Wet the muck souses; And should they be touched with the Sunderland gripes, The balmy effects of their stomachs and tripes Are infallibly destined to roll through the pipes

By which I replenish your houses.

Then why with alarm do you tremble and gape, Since should you not wholly the Mlorbas escape, You'll have it, no doubt, in a modified shape

If thus second-hand you can catch it; And some lucky night there may come a great fire, Which, in cases of pest, is a grand purifier: You need have no fear it too soon should expire,

Without water sufficient to match it. (4.)

King W LIAvt and I are of different opinions: I oppose all Reform within both our dominions, And should THE BILL pass, I shall weep without onions,

And loathe even leeks in my sorrow. Then let not Reform, though she daily grows stronger, Decree that no borough shall rot any longer; Still buy putrefaction of me, the old monger,

And there yet shall be one RorrEN BOROUGH.

Your thirsts, my brave People i! still venture to quench, To boil all your victuals, your skins all to drench, With my liquid Corruptions-regardless of stench,

And every unnameable thing At defects so innoxious continue to wink, And without further tir for my Wet give your chink, For the more that you stir it, the more it vill stink-

And so ends the Speech of your King!

Ho! ho ! with his water, pray why should you differ? You never had friend that would stick to you stiffier :

q1 il he Moaj,;sty

of Mvd," Groom of Like clay it will handle, t arang his train, and foturish qf And taste like acandlc,

wind- n runwnts ; Privy Councilors and cour- And smell like the snuff; tiers ut-is exquisite stuffy iejk tin- And so long as it sellsis his honesty seen:

Shouldit lie on his hands~, they would neverbe clean.

Beer Street (1750-51) in both the themes and compositional designs of Work.26 This is not surprising considering Brown's

high opinion of Hogarth and his position as one of the founders of the Hogarth Club. However, there is a far subtler shade to Brown's Work than the polemics of Hogarth's illustrations. Whereas Hogarth's Beer Street is meant to

3 George Cruikshank, Salus Populi Suprema Lex. London, British Museum (courtesy of the Trustees of the Museum)

provide a positive model opposing the negative values he

portrays in Gin Lane, in Brown's Work, "Gin Lane" and "Beer Street" are merged to portray the problems of alcohol in

general. While Brown himself did imbibe the odd drink (he appears not to have been a temperance advocate), there are

suggestions throughout Work of the negative effects of alcohol relative to the purity of water. There are, for

example, the stunted potman, the orphans abandoned by their drunken father, and the children heading off to a

standpipe. And while beer is not shown in a specifically

26 H. Gavin, Sanitary Ramblings, London, 1848, 88-89. Johnson traces these links between Hogarth's images and Work.




328 THE PENNY ILLUSTRATED PAPER our, 21, Im6

HAUNT 1YOUHOLSneMaIT TU DUIWOIfT WATR USUPLYIN BST HAR -Gas,

4 Haunt for Cholera in The Penny Illus- trated Paper, Ix, Oct. 21, 1865, 328 (photo: author)

negative light (one worker is shown drinking a jar of ale), its

accessibility to the lower classes, particularly versus that of water for drinking, was an issue of the period. In 1854, the General Board of Health warned: "Beware of drink, for excess in beer, wine, or spirits, is likely to be followed by cholera."27

On October 13, 1854, Brown wrote in his diaries of his

great disappointment when a laborer he had admired came to him and begged the price of "half a pint of beer." Brown noted that he gave the man the money with scorn.28 In turn, Brown had in 1847 saved an inebriated and incapacitated man from a possible fire in a workshop full of wood chips. For the painter, the issue of alcohol and its effects on the

working classes was a deeply personal concern: his working- class wife, Emma, suffered from alcoholism, and Emma's

drinking effectively orphaned Brown's daughter Lucy, who was sent away to be raised separately from Emma and her

drinking.29 And while Brown himself enjoyed a drink, class distinctions meant that alcohol consumption was viewed in a different light for those in the lower classes versus those of the middle and upper classes. William Johnston wrote in 1851 that there was no doubt that beer drinking among the lower classes led to immoral and criminal activities-and he noted that the problem was viewed so strongly that between 1849 and 1850 a committee of the House of Lords attempted to set down guidelines for regulating beer consumption and beer sales.30s By the mid-nineteenth century beer was no

longer the sensible British drink of Hogarth's Beer Street, and

pure water had become its replacement. Temperance post-

ers of the period showed a thermometer in which good living and water were united at the top of the thermometer stem, while evil and gin were located in the base of the bulb: beer was somewhere in the mid-range. The value placed on water in the period can also be witnessed in the large number of

sculptured temperance drinking fountains that dotted Lon- don by the end of the nineteenth century.

Brown's concerns were consistent with those of the Lon- don Medical Officers of Health, who advocated that drunkenness among the working classes, along with social unrest and dissent (those major Victorian bugbears), could only be alleviated by the provision of pure and economical water.31 Christian socialists, such as Charles Kingsley, wrote tracts on the relationship between cleanliness, water supply, and

temperance (such as his grandly titled article, "The Power of

Soap and Water"). And it was Kingsley, patron of the Ladies Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge, who

gave the battle cry of the time, that "A man's sobriety is in direct proportion to his cleanliness."32 An article in Punch of 1844 entitled "Soap" satirically noted that the campaign for

public baths would soon create a democratic leveling in which the class distinction between the washed and great unwashed would be lost.33 The very cleanliness of Brown's laborers (often criticized as being less than realistic) symbol- izes Maurice's, Kingsley's, and Carlyle's view that cleanliness

27 "General Board of Health List of Cholera Precautions," The Times, Sept. 4, 1854, 7. 28 Oct. 13, 1854, Brown, 1981, 102. 29 Emma's alcoholism is mentioned in T. Newman and R. Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle, London, 1991, 90, 128, and 149; and in Brown's Diaries (see n. 4 by Surtees on 162; Oct. 2, 1865, 206; and nn. on p. 207).

30See Johnston (as in n. 19), II, 247, in a chapter examining beer shops and drinking habits. 31 See, for example, The Times, Sept. 4, 1854, 7. Thomas Miller, in his Picturesque Sketches of London: Past and Present, London, n.d. [ca. 1851], calls for the people of London to "agitate for pure air and pure water, and break through the monopolies of water and sewer companies" (see pp. 279-282). 32 Charles Kingsley, quoted in A. S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain, London, 1983, 72.

33 "Soap," Punch, vii, 1844, 182.



FORD MADOX BROWN'S WORK AN ICONOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS 629

was a symbol of purity. Hence these workers of the "new river" represent, in their pristine beauty, the purity of their labor. Their work both literally and figuratively cleans away the stigma of belonging to the "Great Unwashed." Indeed, Brown, at the end of his catalogue entry, provides a possible cryptic reference to his "new stream" when he refers to a

rapid river over which some of the laborers portrayed had

worked, and then, inexplicably, draws the reader's and viewer's attention by italicizing the phrase the "gliding motion

ofthe water underneath. "34

Brown was asked to include Kingsley in the composition by the painting's demanding patron, Thomas Plint, yet Brown

actually portrayed the Christian Socialist F. D. Maurice, one of the founders of the Working Men's College. Plint did induce Brown to include, however, a tract distributor (Plint was a strong supporter of tract distribution), who hands out a bill entitled "A Hodman's Haven, or Drink for Thirsty Souls."35 The tract distributor is typical of many of her time, shown as a middle-class woman of high-minded intentions with regard to temperance, but somewhat condescending and ignorant about relevant social and economic concerns

(especially the water supply) that caused the working class to drink. In this image of the tract distributor, Brown plays upon Plint's demands. Brown notes in his catalogue entry to Work that it has not struck the tract distributor to enquire of the hodman's

knowledge on these matters: a hodman might inform her of how life actually "presents itself" from his working-class perspective.36 To reinforce the irony of a situation in which it is the hodman who, with his work, truly clears the pestilent swamp of intemperance with a flowing stream of fresh water, Brown has the "scorned" temperance tract, as he terms it, with its aptly titled "Drink for Thirsty Souls," float unre-

garded into the water-main pit.37 In other ways too Brown capitalizes upon this direct

textual reference, incorporated into the painting, to point to the visual theme of water supply. In order to reinforce both the Christian benefits and allusions of fresh water supply, and to reflect on the neglected status of the "Great

Unwashed," Brown includes at the top center of the painting's frame (on the proscenium arch which serves to accent the dramatic staging of the scene) an excerpt from the

Gospel according to John. It reads: "I must work while it is

day, for the night cometh when no man can work" (John 9:4).38 Not only is water one of the dominant symbols of this

particular gospel, but the gospel and symbol were central to Brown's contemplation at the time. Between 1847 and 1861 he had been working on a watercolor entitled Oure Lady of Good Children (Tate Gallery, 1847-61) in which the Madonna is shown washing the Christ child, with a bowl of water held

by an angel. Water had appeared as a motif in a number of Brown's other paintings. A fountain appears in Chaucer at the Court of Edward Ill (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1851), and water is central to The Baptism of Eadwine

(untraced, 1880; repro. in Hueffer, 329). Brown had alsojust completed his Jesus Washing Peter's Feet (Tate Gallery, 1852-

56), with its theme taken directly from John 13:5, when he

began the composition for Work. In these paintings, but

particularly in Jesus Washing Peter's Feet, we find a concern with the role of humility, equality, water, and cleansing as it relates to Christian socialism. In Work these concerns are further secularized. The quotation from the Gospel accord-

ing to John on the frame occurs in a parable wherein a blind

beggar, shunned by his fellow man, is commanded by Christ to wash anointed mud off his face. The beggar then stands revealed anew: sighted, cleansed of his stigma (metaphorical- ly the sign of his beggary and low position), and the equal of all men. Brown has chosen this quotation as a reference to a

parable whereby the cleansing of the working class with fresh water is likened to Christ's cleansing of the beggar (and by extension, an act of humility and equality like Jesus' washing of Peter's feet).

But Brown does not limit these biblical references, of which there are four on the frame of Work, to water symbols alone. Each quotation has, as Brown obliquely hints in his

commentary, its own semiotic link, or visual signifier, in the

painting. Brown indeed often designed his frames with

specific visual effects-and the painting's themes-in mind, and each quotation used on the frame of Work was clearly chosen prior to the painting's completion, and later in- scribed on the frame.39 These quotations were meant to

provide the viewer with an exterior and text-based frame of reference for a number of the visual allusions within the painting.

Brown tells us that in the painting the pastry boy's tray, for

example, represents "the symbol of superfluity," of excess and waste. He links this symbol to that of the idle rich on horseback: "These are the rich, who 'have no need to work,'-not at least for bread-the 'bread of life' is neither here nor there.'"40 Through these remarks in the catalogue, and the symbol of the pastry boy, Brown deliberately makes us aware of how the visual images are directly linked, and

visually complement, the inscription on the top left of the frame: "Neither did we eat any man's bread for nought, but

wrought with labour and travail night and day" (2 Thess. 3:8). It is this quotation, and Brown's commentary on it, that alerts one to his linking of biblical reference and visual counterpart.

The quotation at the top right of the frame reads: "See'st thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings" (Prov. 22:29). This reference is plain since the

diligence of the workers is obvious. What may not be evident is that Proverbs 22 opens with a statement concerning the

equality of all men, whether they be rich or poor, before God. A man of socialist leanings, Brown renders this ideal through a gathering of all the classes. The lower classes are empha- sized, and given nobility and equality, through a dominant

position in the painting. The wealthy classes, represented by the idling couple on horseback, are halted in their progress

34 Brown, 1865, 31.

35 Hueffer, 112. 36 Brown, 1865, 29. 37 Ibzd., 28. 38 Johnson gives a plausible explanation for the abbreviation of this quotation (151, n. 30); however, it is likely it was abbreviated for a more

practical, and aesthetic, reason: to take up less space on the arch of the frame, thus making the lines less obtrusive. 39 See the following Dzarzes entries for references to his frame designs: Feb. 28, 1848 (p. 32); Mar. 21, 22, and 27, 1848 (pp. 35 and 36); Aug. 16, 1854 (p. 74 and n. 7). 40 Brown, 1865, 28.




by the workers who represent nobility of labor, in an inverted form of noblesse oblige. The hierarchic positioning of the elite is visually undermined, for Brown reduces them to a darkened background and diminished position, while laborers and "brainworkers" occupy the sunlit foreground.

Of primary concern for this article is the inscription on the bottom of the frame, which indicates Brown's extensive use of floral symbolism. Recent scholarship, such as Sabine Haass's "Speaking Flowers and Floral Emblems," and Nico- lette Scourse's The Victorians and Their Flowers, has noted an almost cultish interest in botanical symbolism and floral

imagery among Victorians, particularly writers and artists.41 In English literature, Eliot, Thackeray, Edward Lear, and Christina Rossetti all utilized "the language of flowers" as a

literary device within their works. Michael and Sarah Fara-

day, on a more private level, put together a personal flower book that combined pressed flowers with related manuscript verse.42 And John Ruskin went so far as to publish a study of botanical nomenclature called Proserpine, which combined an artistic rendering of flowers with a "Ruskinian" adjusted botanical classification. The emblematic reading and render-

ing of botanical signs, in both painting and literature, became something of a Victorian, and Pre-Raphaelite, passion. The Pre-Raphaelites were, at times, consumed by this floral mania-for it provided the basis to develop an iconography of contemporary currency, with historical, religious, and social overtones. At the same time this iconography also linked contemporary interests in botany and scientific obser- vation with the Pre-Raphaelites' own highly observant and detailed painting methods. Finally it allowed, through emblematic interpretation, the linking of imagery and ex-

panded text in an unobtrusive manner.

Brown, himself an avid gardener, painted with an extreme concern for botanical accuracy. He stressed the importance of botanical imagery in an article of 1850 that he wrote on

history painting for the Pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ- an apt title given its connotations of botanical germination. He stated that one must carefully consider the vegetation necessary to the "elucidation of the subject."43 Yet Brown's concern for floral imagery extended beyond history painting to his themes of modern life: he pointed to the need to use

cabbages, for instance, in The Last of England (City Art

Gallery, Birmingham, 1855) to "indicate to the practised eye a lengthy voyage; but for this their introduction would be

objectless."44 While Brown considered The Last of England to be a history painting, hidden within a contemporary subject, in more contemporary paintings such as the aptly titled The

Nosegay (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1865), May Memories

(1869-84, untraced, repr. in Hueffer, 255), and Stages of Cruelty (City Art Gallery, Manchester, 1856-90; where a

spray of "Love-Lies-Bleeding" is held by a young girl), flowers are central to their themes and correct reading. Care must be taken, however, in correctly deciphering these

myriad botanical and floral symbols, symbols that Brown used extensively in a number of his other paintings. As Dickens declared in Nicholas Nickleby (with a certain pre- Freudian innocence), he knew of no "language of vegetables which converts a cucumber into a formal declaration of attachment." Because of the nun.'er of floral dictionaries

published during the Victorian period, there were often

contradictory definitions of certain flowers.45 In Work, this previously unnoticed use of botanical and

floral iconography is of particular importance in light of the

quotation from Genesis (3:19) on the bottom of the frame: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." This refers to labor as Adam's and Eve's punishment for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. In the central portion of the painting, a

young apprentice labors, carrying a mortar pail full of water-Brown's recurring symbol. In his right hand, held out clearly to be seen, toward the spectator, is an apple.46 This symbol of the Temptation is placed here, in a young laborer's hand during a moment of work, to remind the

biblically knowledgeable and botanically literate Victorians that labor, in all its forms, is part of the process that leads one toward redemption from Original Sin. The apple therefore

emphasizes the dignity of the labor portrayed in the painting. There is further botanical and floral symbolism scattered

throughout the painting, related to the various themes of Work.47 The young orphaned child, modeled by Brown's own

41 S. Haass, " 'Speaking Flowers and Floral Emblems': The Victorian Language of Flowers," in Word and Vzsual Imagznatzon, ed. K. J. Holtgen, P. Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes, Erlangen, 1988; N. Scourse, The Vzctorzans and Thezr Flowers, London, 1983; see also D. Apostolos-Cappadona, "Oxford and the Pre-Raphaelites from the Perspective of Nature and Symbol,"Journal of Pre-Raphaelzte Studzes, Nov., 1981.

The emblematic reading of botanical signs was most notable in the floral analysis made of C. Collins's Convent Thoughts (see Scourse, 49), and Holman Hunt's Lzght of The World (noted by Haass, 254). As Christina Rossetti herself noted: "A blessing on the flowers/ . .. They show us symbols deep" (quoted in Apostolos-Cappadona, 102). Floral analysis of Pre-Raphaelite work continues in such works as G. Pollock's "Woman as Sign," in her Viszon and Dzfference, London, 1988. Pollock notes that floral symbolism was used extensively in Pre-Raphaelite circles (see 135, n. 29). See also B. Seaton's "Considering the Lilies: Ruskin's 'Proserpina' and other Victorian Flower Books" (Vzctorzan Studzes, xxvIII, 2, Winter, 1985, 255-282), particularly on the development of "flower missions." 42 Located in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the book was compiled between 1850 and 1853.

43 For Brown's concerns with botanical accuracy, see his Dzarzes entry for July 26, 1849 (p. 66), and Hueffer, 107; Brown's interest in gardening is noted throughout June and July of 1855 in his diary-indeed as his entry for July 24 indicates, his garden appears to have been an escape

when he was painting badly. Quotation from Ford Madox Brown, "On the Mechanism of the Historical Picture," The Germ: Thoughts toward Nature in Poetry, Lzterature, andArt, no. 2, Feb., 1850, New York, fac., 1965, 70.

44Brown, 1865, 8. 45 S. Haass has argued that a standard design for flower books existed in England, generally in their format and structure (Haass [as in n. 41], 249), and that inconsistencies are a result of poor editing and misprints (Haass, 252). No consistent floral language has yet been discovered for Pre-Raphaelite imagery, though some standard references were obviously consulted. In this article, the floral definitions have been achieved by matching both consistency of definition and thematic relationship to the context of the painting. Floral dictionaries used include J. Ingram's Flora Symbolzca, 1869; The Language of Flowers, wzth Illustratzve Poetry, 1838; Rev. R. Tyas, The Sentzment ofFlowers or Language Flora, 1869; T. Miller, The Poetical Language of Flowers, 1847; and Miss Carruthers, Flower Lore, 1879. It is interesting to note thatJohn Ingram, author of Flora Symbolwca, was later to write a biography of Ford Madox Brown's son, Oliver. 46 It is possible to confuse the apple with a colored ball of soap, a product of the time from the north of England. This of course would tie in nicely with the theme of cleanliness; however, ball soap was rarely seen after 1847, and close examination of the painting, and its copy in Birming- ham, reveals that the object is an apple. One could, perhaps, press the case that Brown is here making a visual pun. 47 D. Himmelman and B. Godwin of the horticultural department of Olds College (Olds, Alberta, Canada), and Mr. and Mrs. B. M. Wiseman of Cumbria provided valuable assistance in identifying the various flowers




son Arthur (who was to die in infancy prior to the painting's completion), carries daisies, the flowers of childhood and innocence. Beside him, carrot in hand, is a red-haired

sibling. The carrot and curly red hair in Work are part of an extensive iconographic chain helping to link the visual and social narrative in Brown's image through the association of botanical symbolism with social realities. Carrots had long been associated with red hair. Red hair represented the Irish

working class in Victorian iconography and a sizeable proportion of the navvies (or laborers) in England were Irish (men

escaping the Irish Famine): correspondingly, four of the workers in the painting are redheads. Brown even specifically called one of them a "Paddy" (a term still associated with Irish laborers), and Brown's diary indicates that he went in search of Irish immigrants for his painting.48

As the Irish occupied one of the bottom rungs of the Victorian social ladder, unemployment and migratory em-

ployment were among their burdens of existence. On the extreme right of the painting, shaded by the bank of the

road, Brown included an unemployed "young shoeless Irishman" and his wife.49 In turn, because of the hardship of their situation, the Irish were, as the medical reformer Alison was to record, often the first to contract, and suffer from, fever and cholera.50 In fact, these "dirty" Irish (as the

colloquialism went) were believed to be the "means of

generating and communicating infectious disease."51 The

orphaned redhead, before the water main, is a reminder of this link between race, poverty, water supply, and contagion. Indeed, two of the migratory peasants on the bank are, Brown tells us, reduced in strength "perhaps by fever"

(probably, one imagines, caught from a city epidemic).52

Through his involvement with working men's organiza- tions and his attempts to set up a labor bureau for the

unemployed and a soup kitchen, Brown would have been

keenly aware of these conditions. Indeed, Work bears a marked degree of similarity in both social concerns and

composition (in the unemployed field workers) to his friend Walter Deverell's unfinished painting of 1854, The Irish

Beggars (Johannesburg City Gallery, Johannesburg). De- verell's painting also reveals compassion for the plight of

unemployed migrant Irish agricultural workers, and shows the peculiarly Pre-Raphaelite attention to minute social

iconographic detailing that one finds throughout Work. The source for such imagery can be found in the graphic attention to the "agricultural question" (as it was called) in

magazines like Punch, where similar images of destitute farm and migrant workers echo the figures in both Brown and Deverell's works, and foreshadow such paintings as Sir Hubert von Herkomer's Hard Times (Manchester City Art

Gallery, Manchester, 1885).53

Botanical symbolism then is used by Brown to provide "semiotic" clues, clues that help link literary and visual themes of social idealism and social realism together. The elm trees in the background, symbolic of dignity, frame the

dignity of the work being done. The potman wears a small boutonniere of fuchsias and sweet peas. Fuchsias are defined as emblems of taste in the Victorian floral lexicon, while sweet peas are emblematic of departure. Hence this sprig can be seen as a satirical comment on the potman's nature

(he has "vulgar tastes," according to Brown), or on the

transitory nature of the potman's wares (beer), versus the infinite nature of the living waters that Brown stresses in his scene of a water main and the water he alludes to in his frame

inscription from the Gospel according to John.54 These floral emblems are intended to add literary associa-

tions to the literal content of the picture, creating a type of

temporal reading that transcends the stasis of the painting. That Brown realized his static painting failed to convey the full

complexity of his conception, even with its symbolic elements,

may be indicated by the fact that he wrote a five-page catalogue entry about Work to enlarge his narrative. With that particularly English passion of the visual artist for the more historically respected sister art of literature, he and the Pre-Raphaelites were firm believers in linking literary and visual traditions.

For example, to the left in the painting a heroic laborer stands on a landing stage in the pit, shoveling. Brown describes him as in the "pride of manly health and beauty."55 He chews upon the stem of a flower, which can be identified, from its bract and two-toned leaf, as a china or species rose. Such an incongruous botanical tidbit of course begs for notice. In Victorian floriography, the rose is a symbol of

beauty: here it acts as an emblem to reinforce Brown's

literary description of the laborer's physical attributes and the beauty of his labors.

The tract distributor wears a spray of Hepatica flowers in her bonnet (a common floral fashion accessory). True to her

righteous nature, the Hepatica-symbol of confidence-is used to fix her imperious character. And, as if to reinforce the floral associations within the painting, Brown provides other, more direct, references. Immediately in front of the tract distributor, a woman, modeled by Brown's wife, Emma, shades herself with a leaf-shaped parasol. This example of feminine beauty, as Brown notes, should be seen as "a flower that feeds upon the sun"-hence the parasol leaves act as an extension of her floral nature.56 Brown makes traditional use of flowers as the emblems of Vanitas, for he warns the reader that the youthful and beautiful female should pay attention to the salient fact that "certain blessings cannot be insured forever as for instance health may fail, beauty fade, pleasures through repetition pall-I will not hint at the greater calamities to which flesh is heir."''5 Here the catalogue's

in the painting, as did Sheila McGregor of the Birmingham City Art Gallery, and Sara Holdsworth of the Manchester City Art Gallery. 48 Brown, 1865, 27; Mar. 16, 1857, Brown, 1981, 194; Brown's search for Irish immigrants to model for Work was also noted by Hueffer, 168. 49 Brown, 1865, 28. 50o Alison, quoted in the introduction to Chadwick's Report of the Sanitary Condztzon of the Labourzng Population of Great Brztain (as in n. 22), 64. 51 "The Irish Poor Inquiry" (1836), quoted in the introduction to Chadwick (as in n. 22), 15. Also, see Chadwick, 15, 64, 89, 93.

52 Brown, 1865, 28.

53 See, for example, "The Agricultural Question Settled," Punch, viii, 1845, 38. See also Grieve (as in n. 7), 38. 54 Brown, 1865, 30. 55 Ibzd., 27. 56 Ibid., 29.

57' Ibzd.




literary detailing underlines Brown's effort to make floral

beauty serve the iconographic tradition of Vanitas. But his need for a literary entry to explain the associations of the woman points to the limitations of his attempt (shared with the Pre-Raphaelites) to resuscitate an iconographic tradition when the general populace lacked sufficient visual literacy to understand the symbol.

Nevertheless, a more contemporary piece of botanical

iconography needed little explanation by Brown, for in his botanical procession is a chickweed seller, or to use the

colloquial term of the time, a "Botany Ben." The chickweed seller's botanical wares and his prominent placement again draw the viewer's attention to the painting's floral abundance and the role of flowers in the narrative-in his catalogue narrative Brown states that the chickweed seller lives in "Flower Street" (thus reinforcing the floral association).58 The man's flowers, ferns, weeds, and grasses have a literal

meaning-the Victorian viewer knew that he sold the wild fruits of nature's medicinal, culinary, and decorative bounty. Brown writes that the chickweed seller's diverse wares may be of interest to some "sprouting botanist"; Botany Bens, with their baskets of bird fodder, botanical oddities, and ferns for

plant terrariums, supplied a "wild paradise" to those trying to re-create Eden indoors.59 Such floral abundance also serves to reinforce Carlyle's view that through honest labor, one arrived at a "green fruitful meadow." This individual has never been taught to work, according to Brown, but the very flowers he carries expand upon his resourceful nature.

In the hat of the Botany Ben is a spray of wild grain, straw, and plantain. The chickweeds he carries, seen as the symbol of "ingenious simplicity," match his character of "effeminate

gentleness."60 In his lengthy commentary, Brown also points out that the Botany Ben suffers from paranoia. Henry Mayhew noted in London Labour and the London Poor that

beggars, and those soliciting funds on the bottom rung of the street's labor scale, often feigned madness to elicit greater sympathy-and greater sales. Brown here uses the symbolism of the simple and the mad in the straws that surround the man's head. As Michael Hancher has observed, this is an

iconography used by Hogarth, Cruikshank, and by John Tenniel in his illustrations of Shakespeare's "Poor Tom" and Lear and of the March Hare in Alice's Adventures in Wonder-

land.61 Brown briefly had a studio beside Tenniel's in Tudor

Lodge, and he may have arrived at the symbol from his

acquaintance with either Tenniel or Cruikshank, or in his own illustrations of King Lear. However, it is probably from

Hogarth (an artist whom Brown admired greatly) that he drew this now obscure detail. Hogarth, in his engravings of Bedlam Hospital, represents the madness of the hospital inmates by giving them crowns of straw torn from their mattresses. It is from such diverse sources that Brown draws the botanical iconography that expands upon both the character traits and themes to be found in Work.

Brown's attention to detail also extends to the various hats and headgear shown in the painting. Teresa Newman and

Ray Watkinson associate this with the hats that represent the

"epitome of Mammonism in Past and Present.'"62 Clothing was also a central motif in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. It is not

surprising then that Brown uses headgear and clothing to

identify the social class, employment, and ideological back-

ground of the characters portrayed in Work. The upper classes on horseback wear the silk bonnet and top hat typical of their position. The workers wear hats and kerchiefs emblematic of Victorian manual laborers (though surpris- ingly, none wears the disposable paper hat common at the

time). There is, as well, the middle-class millinery of the two women walking beside the open pit; and Carlyle wears a soft felt hat, an item worn as an alternative to the top hat by artists and intellectuals, and one whose style was associated with populist sentiments.63

As Dante Gabriel Rossetti said of Brown, he excelled at "excessive elaboration" and was at times exceedingly prolix in his imagery.64 Sometimes this detailing specifically plays on the painting's literary and visual pretensions. For exam-

ple, a poster on the wall to the left bears the name of an estate agent, William (or Bill to his friends), with the surname Poster: hence, Bill Poster (and, in the background of the

painting a bill poster goes about his business). "Flamstead" is also substituted on these posters for the actual location of the

painting's scene, Hampstead. There was a personal dimension to this property poster: real estate was on Brown's mind at the time. He had been attempting to raise capital on

property he owned in 1855, and he had, during the same

year, been in search of a new rented accommodation.65 Indeed, the painting is full of visual and literary puns. For those familiar with Hampstead geography, and its drinking establishments, the coach and horses just visible rounding the corner of the road in the background of Brown's painting would be recognizable as opposite the exact location of what was from 1721 and is to this day the "Coach and Horses" pub.

Brown notes in his catalogue that the poster titled "Boys' Home" should be read within the context of the painting: "The lady who is giving tracts will no doubt subscribe to

[the "Boys' Home"] presently, and place the urchin

playing with the barrow in."66 The poster thus extends the

painting's narrative in time and social dimension (and also

permits a personal allusion, as Brown had designed a badge for the Boys' Home).67 Similarly, the poster advertising the

Working Men's College-for the education of laborers- refers to F. D. Maurice's founding of that institute in 1854, as well as to Brown's tenure there as an art tutor. Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), in his biography of Brown,

provides specific examples of this network of multiple references linking the literary and visual allusions in Work.68

5 Ibid., 27.

59Ibd., 28. N. Scourse, The Victonans and Their Flowers, London, 1983, 26.

6o Brown, 1865, 27.

61 M. Hancher, The Tenniel Illustratzons to the "Alzce" Books, n.p., 1985, 48-58. 62 T. Newman and R. Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre- Raphaelzte Czrcle, London, 1991, 124. 63 F. Clark, Hats, New York, 1982, 42.

64 D. G. Rossetti, The Letters of Dante Gabrzel Rossetti, ed. O. Doughty and J. R. Wahl, Oxford, 1965, letter 287, 1858, 335. Originally quoted in unpublished typescript on Work, in Manchester City Art Gallery archive files: no author listed. 65 Brown, 1981, see Jan. 28, 1855 (p. 119); n. 26on p. 120; n. 45 on p. 127; Sept. 23, 1855; n. 101 on p. 155.




However, such obscurity and prolixity lead us to consider the

possibility that Brown, while spending eleven years to contem-

plate and expound upon these allusions as he executed

Work, may have lost sight of his viewing audience-in favor of narrative gamesmanship. This might explain the painting's five-page catalogue entry, and Work's lack of popular appeal. Hueffer noted that Brown attempted to espouse "literary ideas" through his images, and Brown himself, while painting Work and The Last of England, bemoaned the

inability of the painter ever to capture a single beautiful moment of nature: "All melting away one tint into another

imperceptibly, & one moment more & cloud passes & all the

magic is gone. .. alas! it is better to be a poet-still better a mere lover of nature, one who never dreams of possession."69

For Brown, it is the poet who is given the gift of catching the moment, through literary narrative. The painter's use of

literary extension can be found in the appearance of Thack-

eray's name on one of the election posters in the background of Work-and the posters themselves refer to the character Bobus in Carlyle's Past and Present. Brown refers to these authors to expand his visual medium into the literary realm,

just as he uses botanical symbolism. All hint at the deeper social narratives hidden within Work.

Indeed, it is through a knowledge of Brown's obscure

allusions, the textual fragments and literary pretensions, the Victorian hats-and the Victorian fascination with dogs- that one identifies a criminal in Work. Brown felt that there was a direct relationship between crime and a lack of

employment. In a sonnet he composed for the exhibition of

Work, this concern is clearly stated:

For want of work, the fiend him soon immesh!... Or they grow noisome beggars to abound, Or dreaded midnight robbers, breaking through.70

In the painting the series of bills and advertisements (Fig. 5) on the wall to the left includes a reward poster. It is part of what Ford Madox Hueffer called Brown's "maze of references and cross-references."71 Again, in his commentary on

Work, Brown draws the viewer's attention to this detail, in an obvious attempt to link it with the sonnet's theme of

unemployment, beggary, and crime. The poster itself is

partially obscured by the chickweed seller, and its text is

fragmentary. Like a detective or mystery novel (developed by Dickens in Bleak House), it identifies a criminal wanted for

robbery through a series of clues. It notes, for example, that the thief had been sighted with a bull terrier (possibly stolen, as the kidnapping of dogs was a thriving and lucrative business for the Victorian underworld). In a copy of the

painting Brown made in 1859 for his friend Leathart, he

expanded this important clue to read "bull terrier pup."'72 In his 1865 commentary Brown mentions that the bull pup shown in the painting belongs to one of the laborers, yet in

light of the clue on the reward poster, the small pup is

obviously associated with the poster's thief. In the foreground of the painting is the small pup

mentioned, a pre-1860s version of the bull terrier. (From the late 1850s through the 1860s this animal's traits were

changed through selective breeding by one James Hinks of

Birmingham, making the bull terrier that is today recognized by a bullet-shaped or, in Kennel Club terms, gladiator head.73 The physiognomy of Brown's dog has only recently come back in vogue, with its contemporary hybrids, the rather infamous pit-bull terrier and the Staffordshire bull.)

Armed with the knowledge that this dog is indeed a bull

terrier, one can examine it solely in terms of the references in the poster. If this is the dog mentioned, one assumes that its owner is nearby. Two further clues from the poster guide us in identifying the culprit associated with the pup. The poster refers to "fustian" (a "suit of fustian" in the Birmingham copy), meaning a working man's cloth of velveteen, brocade, or corduroy weave, olive green to burnt umber in color. Fustian is a cloth that could be linked to both a lower class and a criminal element, or at least it would have been worn

by underground members: Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby writes that "the thief in fustian is a vulgar character."'74 Brown's "fustian" narrows the field of suspects in the painting dramatically. In the background a likely suspect loiters

66 Brown, 1865, 30. 67 Mentioned in unpublished typescript in Manchester City Art Gallery archive files: no author; see also N. Pevsner, "Colonel Gillum and the Pre-Raphaelites," Burlington Magazzne, Mar. 1953, 78. 68 Hueffer, 196. Hueffer notes, for example, that a poster, barely visible on a back wall in the painting, reads "Snoox Again Tonight on Cats." He then gives us two different references for the poster. The first is Brown's catalogue reference, which tells us that this notice refers to the cats in the painting, mewing and howling prior to the start of the august lecture (to be held in the building of both the cats and the poster). The second reference Hueffer provides is a more personal one: Snoox is based upon a character created by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and used in private stories he would tell. Here again one may note Brown's linkage of the literary and oral (Rossetti's stories) and the visual (cats and lecture) in a series of obscure allusions-allusions with references both within and without the painting. 69 Hueffer, 94. July 21, 1855, Brown, 1981, 145. 70 Brown, 1865, 27; sonnet accompanying Work (Feb. 1865). The sonnet is reproduced in full here because it is not included with any other major accounts or selections from Brown's catalogue entry (the entry itself has never been correctly reproduced in full); it also encapsulates a number of themes in Work.

WORK! which beads the brow, and tans the flesh Of lusty manhood, casting out its devils! By whose weird art, transmuting poor men's evils,

Their bed seems down, their one dish ever fresh. Ah me! For lack of it what ills in leash, Hold us. It's want the pale mechanic levels To workhouse depths, while master Spendthrift revels. For want of work, the fiends him soon immesh!

Ah! beauteous tripping dame with bell-like skirts, Intent on thy small scarlet-coated hound, Are ragged wayside babes not lovesome too? Untrained, their state reflects on thy deserts, Or they grow noisome beggars to abound, Or dreaded midnight robbers, breaking through.

71 Hueffer, 415 and 84. 72 The two posters have only minor differences in text: the original reads, as well as I can determine, as follows: "way Robbery/50? Reward./reas a robbe/of great violen/ox Lane, on s/the above her/een's pardon/offt?] a principal/formation/[conv?]iction./were seen loiter/y of the outrage/being connected/last seen on the Bar/h them a bull terrier/was dressed in/ite billy-cock/ot one eye/fustian." The Birming- ham copy adds the additions of "bull terrier pup" and "suit of fu[s?]tian" as the major differences. 73 See T. W. Hogarth, The Bull Terrier, Manchester, n.d. [ca. 1937], 2nd ed. revd.;J. F. Gordon, The Bull Terrzer, London, 1973, 2 and 17; and D. Fleig, The Straffordshzre Bull Terrier, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1990.

74 Charles Dickens, Nzcholas Nzckleby, Philadelphia, n.d., 134.




5 Detail of Fig. 1

against a tree, in the shadows, away from the light of labor. He is, of course, dressed in a fustian material. Brown notes in his

commentaries that the fellow is of a stoic nature and somewhat

short of cash. If we recall the Victorian passion for physiognomy, the stoic's appearance is highly suspect: he has rather heavy features and a slightly sullen scowl. Indeed, he fits Punch's

"Paddy" or "Fenian" hooligan type, often shown as the instigator of robberies, and just then reaching prominence for both his

features and dress in caricatures.75 Beneath the brim of his hat, Brown's figure stares across the street and watches the progress of a policeman who is hustling an orange seller along (a scene of excessive police force that was galling to Brown).

Yet the term "Billy-cock" on the poster is needed to

identify the suspect or suspects. "Billy-cock" was a mid-

nineteenth-century colloquialism specifying a type of hat (a "wide awake" hat) worn by the lower classes, and once

associated with a rough clientele. Brown's diaries indicate

that he had purchased just such a "dirty old wide awake" hat

for a model in the painting.76 It is this character, equipped with a battered and punched-out Billy-cock hat, who is the

culprit mentioned in the reward poster. He is suspicious

looking, furtive in his glance, hides himself under his

Billy-cock hat, wears fustian, and lives, Brown tells us, among the worse thiefs and cut-throats in London. Our thief

appears to be the very man who obscures the reward poster, the chickweed seller.

The reason the thief separated himself from the pup is

obvious, for he is surrounded by police officers: one is

already across the road, as noted before, and another

police officer, on horseback, is coming upon him from the

left by the elm trees. The Botany Ben has probably just rid

himself of his primary visual identifier as a fugitive, the bull

terrier pup-for, as Brown notes, a laborer in the picture has

on his hands a "valuable bull-pup" (another reason for the

75The image of the Paddy/Fenian can be seen, for example, in Punch, xxvii, 1854, 42, and Punch, xxviii, 1855, 130. There are a number of

images showing similar characters in the process of robbing swells, or involved in other criminal activities, as in Punch, xxv, 1853, 222. 76 Brown, 1981, Mar. 18, 1857, 194-196.




thief to let him go)."77 In Brown's original design for Work

(Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, n.d.), the Botany Ben was first portrayed as what looks like a dog seller. He

appears similar in dress and appearance to an individual that

Henry Mayhew illustrates as such a man (Brown's original character was also shown holding a small dog); and dog sellers were sometimes, as Mayhew notes, involved in the crime of dog kidnapping.78

In addition, there is one fragmented clue on Brown's reward poster that no sleuthing appears readily to solve. This is the phrase "ot one eye." It may refer to the bull pup having one red eye, or perhaps, obliquely, to that nefarious criminal Bill Sikes in Dickens's Oliver Twist as depicted by Cruikshank in 1838 (Fig. 6). Bill Sikes also wears a punched-out Billy- cock style of hat79 and a velveteen or fustian coat, and has a bull-terrier kind of dog with a black patch called "Bull's eye." And Bill Sikes is introduced to us in the novel as having just received a black eye. We can return to our initial suspect, the stoic against the tree, and find visual parallels with Sikes, even down to the garters. But these links are only specula- tive.

The fragmented reward poster may simply be emblem- matic of the desire of the viewer (and particularly the art

historian) to seek a story and a narrative, indeed a type of reward, where no chain of signs was ever intended. Or the

poster may point to an incomplete narrative, one never

finished, or one abandoned, by Brown. Though the chickweed seller is our main suspect, Brown states in his guide to Work that if it weren't for the chickweed seller's "gentle disposition... he might [my emphasis] have been a burglar!"80 It seems to be an almost deliberate admission by Brown that we may suspect the very character who obscures the reward

poster. Thus the catalogue entry contradicts the evidence of the composition and of the text within the painting (the reward poster). This play with our expectations recalls Brown's high opinion of Carlyle, who also "reversed men's notions upon criminals."''

Brown may have deliberately created obscurity in order to

waylay the viewer into biased expectations, and thus he can

slap us on the wrist for jumping to conclusions about character and "type." The artist admired Carlyle's "wild sallies" and joking nature, and perhaps he had fun at the viewer's (and art historian's) expense-exposing our own desire to find meaning by ultimately withholding meaning's key.82 This is not out of character for Brown. His grandson, Ford Madox Hueffer, who probably best understood the

relationship between Brown the man and his paintings, noted that one is often faced with a "hopelessly enigmatic" reading of his works-even if they do present, as Helen Madox Rossetti said, "every inch of. . . canvas pregnant with

meaning and thought."83 An inconclusive ending such as this one, with its lack of a hermetically sealed resolution about Brown's thief, may not fit the canon of art-historical analysis. Yet

... . ...............

, -- ......-........

....

6 George Cruikshank, Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist (courtesy of the Dickens House Museum, London)

it does reveal something of the artistic and creative process, and the role of play and obscurity, within a work of art.

This obscurity points to a central problem that exists in the union of literary and pictorial to which Brown's painting aspires, as seen in the biblical quotations around its frame, the posters within it, and Brown's sonnet and five-page catalogue entry about it: for though the Victorians considered literature and painting sister arts, they no longer enjoy such a sibling relationship today. There is no doubt that Brown felt a need to expand upon the visual through his

catalogue entry, sonnet, and biblical references. Brown's

failing with Work, and its lack of popularity even to this day, may be the result of the fact that the painting is less successful without its text and sonnet (which were never widely circulat-

ed), without close reading of its "intertextual" surface- without an awareness of its obscurity. What a shame it is that Work is still exhibited without the guidance of the full catalogue entry and sonnet beside the painting in its home in Manchester.

Water, flowers, the Irish, the beggar, the thief, valuable

dogs, and police: the semiotic underpinnings of Brown's narrative are reflections of his deep awareness of the social

77 Brown, 1865, 29. 78 Brown's original design shows a figure holding a small dog much like the illustration The Street Dog Seller in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols., New York, 1967; repr. of 1861-62 ed., n,

55. 79 A. Ribeiro of the Courtauld Institute has noted that this may be the later version of the Billy-cock (in correspondence, Dec. 18, 1990).

80 Brown, 1865, 27. 81 Brown, quoted in Hueffer, 190. 82 Ibid. 83 Hueffer, 84; Rossetti (as in n. 4), 13.




~U i NOTORO

TEtR

THESTEE U AAI

7 The Street Up Again! in Punch, Apr. 23, 1859, 165 (photo: author)

conditions and reforming goals prevalent in Victorian En-

gland. What has appeared in some eyes to be mere senten- tious detailing in the painting is in fact a complex symbolic and iconographic chain representing ideals and realities. And this chain is, in turn, linked to other contemporary Victorian iconographic and graphic traditions. Brown's depiction of street construction obstructing upper-class passage (idealizing the value of labor over the idleness of the rich) is not only tied to the satirical images concerning the water

supply by John Leech and Cruikshank, but can also be connected to a new graphic imagery in which such street obstructions are used as a symbolic statement on the condition of England. For example, in 1859 Punch showed a somewhat similar scene called "The Street Up Again!," with Disraeli as a navvy, laboring in a pit, obstructing the business interests of the nation (Fig. 7).84

Brown, in his treatise on Work, specifically attempts to draw our attention to these thematic and social chains, without actually giving everything away through full textual

expansion. He opened his catalogue entry by stating that

persons of note sat for their portraits in the painting, but he refrained from publishing their names.85 Unfortunately, the

painting was never to have the impact Brown had intended: it was exhibited in a poorly attended one-man show; it never received the mass publicity of being engraved by Gambart or

by any of the major print houses; and it remained in a private collection until the end of the century-only coming to light in a period after water had been monopolized by the Crown to ensure clean and adequate supply.86

Brown made Work a visual and literary game, which, over his eleven years of contemplation and labor on it, grew in its

complexity. It is this complexity of accumulated detail and

iconography, and the references to modern themes of water

supply and labor, that make it a visually literate work, an emblematic narrative of the highest order. Brown's concern for the plight of the destitute and the working class, as

interpreted through Carlyle's Past and Present, provides the basis of his morality play; through an extensive knowledge of the painting's use of contemporary iconography, its true

complexity and richness can be fully appreciated. It remains not just a Victorian masterpiece, but a topical reflection of

contemporary concerns in England regarding a return to water privatization, failing water supply, and increasing water pollution.

Gerard Curtis, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Essex, is Lecturer ofArt History at Memorial University, Newfoundland. He is currently researching the relationship of word to image in Victorian England; his article on this topic, "The Art of Seeing: Dickens in the Visual Market," will be published shortly [Dept. of Visual Arts, Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University, Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, A2H 6P9].

84 See also Hooray-The Streets Up Again!, Punch, Apr. 6, 1861, 137.

85Brown, 1865, 26. 86 See M. Bennett, "The Price of Work: The Background to Its First Exhibition, 1865," in Pre-Raphaelite Papers, ed. L. Parris, London, 1984, 143-152.

Frequently Cited Sources

Brown, Ford Madox, 1865, The Exhibition of Work and Other Paintings by Ford Madox Brown at the Gallery, 191 Piccadilly, exh. cat., London.

, 1981, The Diaries of Ford Madox Brown, ed. V. Surtees, New Haven.

Hueffer, Ford Madox, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work, London, 1896.

Johnson, E.D.H., "The Making of Ford Madox Brown's Work," Victorian Artists and the City, ed. I.B. Nadel and F.S. Schwarzbach, New York, 1980, 142-151.



Article Contentsp. [623]p. 624p. 625p. 626p. 627p. 628p. 629p. 630p. 631p. 632p. 633p. 634p. 635p. 636

Issue Table of ContentsThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 551-702Volume Information [pp. 700-702]Front MatterEditorialOut of Site, Out of Mind [p. 551]

Who's Who in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture's Reluctant Self-Revelation [pp. 552-566]The Magnifici Tomb: A Key Project in Michelangelo's Architectural Career [pp. 567-598]Gricault's Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold [pp. 599-618]Some Evangelical Roots for Hbert's Toujours et jamais [pp. 619-622]Ford Madox Brown's Work: An Iconographic Analysis [pp. 623-636]Fernand Khnopff, Georges Rodenbach, and Bruges, the Dead City [pp. 637-654]Cubism, Celtism, and the Body Politic [pp. 655-668]Cosmopolitan Difference in Max Dvok's Art Historiography [pp. 669-678]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 679-681]Review: untitled [pp. 681-683]Review: untitled [pp. 683-686]Review: untitled [pp. 687-690]Review: untitled [pp. 690-692]Review: untitled [pp. 692-694]

Books Received (July-September 1992) [pp. 695-698]Abstracts of Articles, December 1992 [p. 699]Back Matter

Documents

Ford Madox Brown's Work: An Iconographic Analysis