Can't distract you with Oliver Twist, eh?

To reiterate a point I made early on in this thread, Britain put their own lower class through much suffering and then you have historians like this one who calls anybody who says so "pessimistic."

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-industrial-revolution-working-class-po

"Writers such as Dickens, Engels, and the Hammonds have made the terms industrial revolution and capitalism synonymous with degradation of the working class. Pessimistic interpretations of the industrial revolution..."

So Dickens was "pessimistic"? What's this pessimistic? These things either happened or they didn't. Dickens put what he saw was happening around him into a novel. Many more people learned about what it was to be a poor orphan during that time than if he had merely written a history book. Oliver Twist changed a lot of minds and hearts.