Ford Madox Brown's fascinating realist painting Work takes as its heroes a group of labourers laying water pipes in The Mount, Hampstead. They are surrounded by a variety of picturesque characters representing the different classes and occupations of Victorian society, including two intellectuals - Thomas Carlyle and the Rev F. D. Maurice, whose ideas are crucial to the painting's meaning. This fully illustrated book tells the story behind Brown's masterpiece - its sources in popular art, its composition and its 'message', as well as its critical reception at the time and its impact on art in the twentieth century. Walker also examines the history of Hampstead in the 1850s, the wider issues of conflict and ideas in Victorian Britain and the social history of London with its cast of navvies, urchins and street vendors, philosophers, reformers and idlers