These British Blue Books reports were based on country-wide surveys conducted for the Parliament and as such were anything but anectodal. I specifically quoted an American magazine to emphasize how visible this misery was even to a foreign observer. In the case at hand, they surveyed some of the most populated English factory towns which your "average worker" would have called home. Not the "slums of Victorian cities", to quote historian Sheridan Wayne Gilley, where life was even harder for the "half-heathen multitudes of the Victorian urban poor". Just those average workers which had been "herded into factories and workshops, subjected to industrial regulation, and denied the fullest political freedoms". You get the picture.