In the middle of the nineteenth century, the seamstress emerged in the popular press as a powerful image of exploited labor. Parliamentary debates about the rights of urban workers in this period frequently focused on the many women who took in piecework and endured difficult conditions to scrape together a living with their needles. Charles West Cope’s work follows the pattern set by earlier images of urban seamstresses, which were often inspired by Thomas Hood’s popular poem “The Song of the Shirt,” first published in an early Christmas issue of Punch (1843). Like Anna Blunden’s “For Only One Short Hour” (shown nearby), Home Dreams suggests that the memory of a rural home left behind for work in the city provides the only relief from the long hours of low-wage labor. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016