>What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
From memory, it was something about the English belief that their naval supremacy was like "a law of nature", only to have it shattered in one day by a country with little naval history (Germany). Together with the equally short-lived delusion that "the whole world would become exactly like England".
And I don't know why you chose such a misleading metric as wages rather than actual living standards of the British working class as late as 1919. From McClure's Magazine:
>Every European visitor who has traveled through the United States has commented upon the stature of men and women in our factory towns as opposed to the factory classes in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. The Blue Book Reports of the British Parliament have stressed the number of British working men with dwarfed physique. Investigation shows an abnormal number of young men whose optic nerve was so imperfect they could not see the sights of a rifle; whose auditory nerve was weak; whose vital force was not sufficient to develop enamel upon the teeth; whose heart action was feeble and whose respiration was sub-normal. British students find the explanation in dark tenements, insufficient food, want of playgrounds where boys and girls could excercise and build their bodies, in child labor, in pregnant women who worked up to within a month of their confinement.
Yes, the bad teeth stereotype might be a living residual of these severe deficiencies (you can still see it in many parts of post-USSR Eastern Europe as well). And before you claim it was any better in the 19th century, know that there's an entire scholarly field devoted to the miseries of the Victorian proletariat.
The truth is, Britain simply did not have the wealth to accommodate its population tripling in size in the span of a few decades. You can still get a sense of this struggling working class feel today by walking through just about any English town and looking at its endless rows of compact, gloomy-looking houses and people.