Rocque: London (1748) a century on

By the 1850s people had migrated into towns and cities at an unprecedented rate. Urban poverty had driven them in search of jobs in the new factories. The towns' infrastructures could not cope, so many places became overcrowded slums.
The middle and upper classes were now prepared to acknowledge the existence of the poor. They feared the poor. They were outnumbered by them. Revolutions had broken out all over Europe in 1830 and again in 1848, the same year that the Chartists set up camp on Kennington Common, in those days a suburb of London.
The middle and upper classes looked to religion for an answer. The conclusion that they came to was that the rich were rich because they were virtuous, and the poor were poor for the opposite reason. The poor had only themselves to blame for their situation. God was punishing them. In order to give the destitute poor a little taste of what was waiting for them in the afterlife, the Poor Law act of 1837 reorganised parishes into unions for the purpose of building workhouses. The workhouse regime was so cruel that the poor were terrified of having to be admitted into them.
Henry Mayhew wrote a pioneering piece of investigative journalism, which was published in 1862 as the four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew went around the slums of London, and interviewed the very poorest inhabitants. He recorded their words verbatim, dialect and all. He describes their lives in the minutest detail, and includes engravings of some of them. Don't delude yourself that Mayhew was being a fairy godmother to the poor. He's just showing the 'good' what will happen to them if they cease to be virtuous. Mayhew's moral judgements make that quite clear. It's a fascinating read though.