Focus on The Crossing Sweeper and analyze the Subject.
The painting depicts a crossing sweeper offering his services to a young woman who is looking out for a gap in traffic to cross the road. Crossing sweepers offered to sweep the streets in front of wealthy-looking pedestrians in the hope of a tip. The roads at that time were often smeared with horse dung because of the prevalence of horse-drawn vehicles. The woman has already lifted her dress to avoid its becoming soiled as she crosses.
The sweepers were often regarded as nuisances who were little more than beggars. The woman in the painting may be pointedly trying to ignore the boy. This was a common theme in commentary on sweepers. An 1853 Punch cartoon entitled "the crossing sweeper nuisance" depicted a hapless middle-class man surrounded by importunate boys holding out their hands for money. In an 1858 issue of Building News similarly negative sentiments were expressed of "those juvenile highwaymen who, broom in hand, take possessions of our crossings and level black mail upon the public in general, and timid females in particular."Frith's sweeper is ostentatiously deferential, while also pushing close to the woman, setting extremes of poverty and wealth up against one another, a theme the artist explored in other works such as Poverty and Wealth, For Better, For Worse and The Derby Day.
Crossing sweeper crossing sweeper The Derby Day