An image from a series of large lithographs Pennell did in 1917 of the factories producing steel products for the war effort. The title, Brobdingnag, is taken from Jonathan Swift's novel, Gulliver's Travels, and was the fictional land occupied by giants. The adjective 'Brobdingnagian' has come to describe anything of colossal size.
Joseph Pennell commented on this image: "Only Swift never imagined and Gulliver never saw presses and ladles and chains and cranes like these; but I have seen them, and there is no imagination in my study of the press or the ladle. A press so powerful it will slowly bend the thickest plate. A ladle so big the men were lost in it."