> physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers
Probably not European, British workers were very well paid by continental standards (cost of living was higher though). If you want an example of pure exploitative capitalism where workers were reduced to near serfdom there is Belgium.
>British workers were very well paid by continental standards
See my reply to jjtwixman above which rebukes this misleading metric. In fact, the cited account is particularly telling in that it is made in comparison to continental standards.
That appears anecdotal? Real wages for unskilled urban workers around 1900 in Britain were higher than in pretty much any other European country. An average worker in England worked less hours and made more money than their equivalent in France and Germany. Only Denmark, Sweden and Ireland were somewhat close.
These British Blue Books reports were based on country-wide surveys conducted for the Parliament and as such were anything but anectodal. I specifically quoted an American magazine to emphasize how visible this misery was even to a foreign observer. In the case at hand, they surveyed some of the most populated English factory towns which your "average worker" would have called home. Not the "slums of Victorian cities", to quote historian Sheridan Wayne Gilley, where life was even harder for the "half-heathen multitudes of the Victorian urban poor". Just those average workers which had been "herded into factories and workshops, subjected to industrial regulation, and denied the fullest political freedoms". You get the picture.
Well… I’m not arguing that the conditions weren’t terrible just that they were better than in most continental countries. US of course was on another level (yet there was plenty of squalor there as well)
Probably not European, British workers were very well paid by continental standards (cost of living was higher though). If you want an example of pure exploitative capitalism where workers were reduced to near serfdom there is Belgium.