William Blake’s reference to ‘dark satanic mills’ in his Jerusalem poem, conjures up negative connotations of the industrial revolution and the impact it had on the lives of ordinary people. Workers toiled away for long hours in dirty factories, with little time for leisure, contemporary commentators suggested. Machines controlled employees’ daily lives and destroyed family life. And there were clear winners and losers – the owners of factories and the workers respectively. This was capitalism at its very worst.

Aside from Blake’s poem (which some say wasn’t even referring to the industrial revolution at all, but instead the Orthodox churches of the establishment), there’s a plethora of literature and journalism describing life for so-called ordinary people in the 19^th century. Perhaps best known was the work of Frederich Engels who drew on two years’ observation of living conditions in Manchester in the early 1840s to produce the left-leaning The…