Across the centuries

I've just been out for a fag, and noticed how cold it's become. It's bright enough though, but it looks set to deteriorate. While I was there I got thinking about the book I'm reading.
In the Eighteenth Century it was seen as people's own fault if they were poor. That view has prevailed to some extent in the present day. Destitution was seen as a crime, and to some extent still is. In those days people had recourse to cheap gin to soften the blow, which nowadays they don't.
Eighteenth-Century paupers had practically no chance of breaking out of their poverty. That is nowadays less the case, as in the present age everyone has access to education, which was only available to the lucky few a couple of centuries ago. People are better-informed now than they were then.
Pauper boys were often trained up for the navy, and it is interesting that even today there are people who still think that national service should be re-introduced to improve the behaviour of delinquents' (who are coincidentally usually from less-privileged backgrounds). The law is less savage and arbitrary than it was then, but we still hear of people who opine that our present system is too lenient.
Food exists in greater quantity and in greater variety now than it did then, but one's access to it is governed by one's income. Ordinary people have more leisure time than then. They also have leisure items in the home (tellies for example) which they didn't then. Most families don't live in single rooms anymore, although some do.
People then were no more religious then than they are now. They were probably more aware of religious stuff than they are now, but did not subscribe to it. After all the established church preached and practiced inequality. The better-off sat in comfortable pews and galleries while the poor were made to stand in the aisles. Sometimes attendance was enforced on such people as domestic servants and apprentices by their 'masters' but that is as far as it went. And they made sure the opposition were disenfranchised (e.g. Catholics and Jews). It is easy to see why the poor did not attend. In the present day the comfortably-off are still the church's power base.
In the Eighteenth Century there was no income tax. In the Twenty-First Century that remains practically the case for the very richest in our society.
People have better healthcare now than they did then, and life expectancy has increased. In those days the mentally ill were shut up in institutions. So were those who were misunderstood. That is still sometimes the case. Many autistic people of my age, for example, have spent much of their lives drugged up to the eyeballs because their condition hadn't been understood. At least they weren't put on show for the amusement of rich visitors, as they were in the previous age.
That book has certainly got me thinking.