Underwood originally intended his block of marble for a composition called Youth, an idea he abandoned. Partly because of the similarities with Michelangelo's Slaves in the Louvre, Paris, the donor suggested that Mindslave attempts to symbolise the struggle to escape from the mental repression prevalent in the totalitarianism of many regimes in Central Europe during the early 1930s. In a Golden Cockerell Press publication of 1934, artists were asked to write a sermon based on a biblical text, which would express their attitude towards life. Underwood contributed one on the Garden of Eden, in which he wrote: 'Our Garden of Eden would be more readily accessible were we equipped with more of the will of the followers of Gandhi from the dark labyrinths of industrial commercialism that threaten us from the West.' In the light of Underwood's pamphlet of 1934, Mindslave might also be viewed as a representation of the limitations imposed on the artist by aesthetic dogma: 'If the future is to hold for him further liberation from the bondage of this earth, it can be secured only by his intuition and imagination.'

Underwood studied at the Polytechnic, Regent Street, London in 1907 before going to the Royal College of Art in 1910. In 1913 he travelled in Europe and then attended the Slade in 1919-20. According to a completed questionnaire sent out by Kineton Parkes in about 1926, Underwood explained that at this date (1926) he had only recently begun to carve.