The widower

This important picture was rapturously greeted by the press on its exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1876. Its appeal to a Victorian audience lay in the readability of its pathetic but all-too-believable subject: the toil-worn labourer despairingly nursing a dying child among the antics of an uncomprehending and newly motherless brood. Fildes had worked as an illustrator of Dickens and a parallel with the great novelist was quick to suggest itself.