Britain’s Victorian industrial revolution was often a brutal business in which men, women and children suffered conditions most of us today cannot even imagine.
To begin with, the new industrialists were seldom worried about the health or safety of their workforce.
The fate of miners was often especially terrible – lungs turned to stone by dust, limbs broken in roof falls, lives shortened by miserable conditions and poor diets.
For many others, sickness was a thing they dreaded above all. They feared it because it would make them unable to work or earn – and so condemn them to the humiliating miseries of
To provide well-rounded coverage and a breadth of insight across various events, we rely on contributions from several staff writers, each bringing their own area of expertise to our publication.