In this painting of the late 1850s, a distraught young woman with unkempt hair and a once clean dress has apparently reached the end of a hard road, taking refuge amongst the dark, dank complex of arches by the River Thames, south of the Strand in London. Above the arches that support the mansion blocks of the Adelphi dwell the great and the good, but underneath lurk the homeless and the desperate. There is no idealism here; rather, there is Dickensian drama and social realism. Balefully lit, this unfortunate girl holds her crucifix, a vestige of hope, as she seems to dissolve into the gloomy miasma of the Thames. This tragic theme was explored in the late poems of Thomas Hood concerning the London poor: The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs. Cruikshank, once called 'the modern Hogarth', illustrator of Dickens, took up oil painting late in life, after giving up the bottle.