Hi, Maz.
I think it depended where you were. There was an unusual degree of cultural development among the young women working in the factories in New England; in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, the "mill-girls" had their own literary magazine, publishing fiction, non-fiction, and a whole lot of poetry. They lived in boarding-houses whose parlors boasted pianos or pianolas, and many of them attended lectures at the local lyceums. (In the mid-19th century, New England boasted the highest literacy rates in the world, and exported schoolteachers to the rest of America.) Dickens, who had witnessed the squalor of English factory workers' lives in Manchester and Birmingham, writes with amazement of all this in his "American Notes."
The fact that he was so amazed by it, of course, suggests the degree to which these conditions were the exception rather than the rule throughout Anglophonia. I suspect there's at least as much truth to your position as to Albert's.
-Peter
(apologies to all for further digression from thread topic)
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