The social disruption caused by industrialisation was a nightmare for many poor and working-class people but an immense opportunity for novelists. And, if progressive legislation was proposed, newly emboldened capitalists often resisted it as an imposition on their freedom – and their profits.
There were almost no restrictions on child labour, working hours, or safety in the workplace. In Britain, the government could barely keep up with the spirit of laissez-faire capitalism.
Huge masses of people flooded into cities for factory work, living cheek-by-jowl in unhygienic slums. Between 17, the countryside rapidly depopulated. The industrial revolution was one of the biggest cataclysms in European history.
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