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. He is an urban worker who obtained flowers, reeds and small animals from the countryside to sell in the centre of the city. Such workers had been chronicled in Henry Mayhew's book London Labour and the London Poor. Brown's catalogue describes the character in Work as a man of "effeminate gentleness" but afflicted with paranoia.Curtis, Gerard (1992). "Ford Madox Brown’s Work: An Iconographic Analysis". The Art Bulletin, vol. 74, no. 4, pp. 623–36. The man's head is covered with straw, the wearing of which is frequently a symbol of madness in art.
