Egg's career embodies a particular Victorian conviction, that painting could carry the same social, moral, and narrative weight as the great realist novels of the period, and his closest friendships, with Charles Dickens above all, situate him at the heart of that ambition.
Egg was born into a prosperous London commercial household. His father, Joseph Egg, was a Huningue-born gunsmith from a distinguished Alsatian gun-making family who had emigrated to London and built a successful trade. The wealth and stability of the family allowed Augustus a route into art that was unusually unhindered: private education followed by formal study at Sass's preparatory school and then at the Royal Academy Schools.
His earliest mature work was in the costume-historical idiom favoured by the early Victorian Academy, with subjects drawn from Shakespeare, Cervantes, Le Sage's Gil Blas, and the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within this register he developed the careful narrative organization, expressive figural drawing, and theatrical compositional sense that would define his mature pictures. The Clique, the loose association of younger painters he joined alongside Dadd, Frith, and others, defined itself against what its members regarded as the stiffness of the older Academy generation, and Egg's early reputation was built within that climate.
The most important external influence on his work came in the late 1840s and 1850s, with the emergence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although a generation older than the Pre-Raphaelites and securely positioned within the Academy, Egg responded to the movement with unusual openness. He acquired paintings by William Holman Hunt, exchanged ideas on colour theory with him, and turned increasingly toward modern-life subjects rendered with precise observation and saturated colour, an approach he refined in works such as The Travelling Companions, painted during a period of convalescence on the Continent.
The triptych Past and Present, exhibited untitled at the 1858 Royal Academy alongside a fictional diary entry, traces the discovery, ruin, and final destitution of a wife after her adultery is exposed. The three panels were among the most discussed pictures of the year, second in attention only to Frith's Derby Day, and have continued to be read as a defining instance of Victorian moral narrative painting and of the period's conflicted treatment of the "fallen woman." The complete triptych entered Tate Britain in 1918.
Egg's working life was inseparable from his close friendship with Charles Dickens. He acted regularly in Dickens's amateur theatrical company alongside Wilkie Collins, John Forster, and Frank Stone, performed in productions throughout England and Scotland for charitable causes between 1847 and 1857, and helped Dickens establish the Guild of Literature and Art, a benevolent organization for needy writers and painters. Persistent ill health drove him to spend his later years in warmer climates on the Continent and in North Africa; he died in Algiers, his career cut short at the height of his reputation.