[legitster]

Kind of. I think the history is interesting here and complex.

One of the hard things to grasp is that the industrial revolution was preceded by an environmental collapse. Part of the reason there was a switch to coal (despite being seen as inferior to wood at the time) was massive depletion of wood in England and the high cost of importing not just timber but even just firewood.

Add this in to the enormously expensive wars England was fighting all through this period and stressed everything from labor and food supplies (which also triggered demand for steel and copper and brass) The industrial revolution happened against a backdrop of national crisis so it's hard to know what was being caused by the revolution and what the revolution was helping paper over.

And on top of this, when Engels and Marx wrote about the squalor and desperation of their time (which was very real), nearly a hundred years had passed and something much different was happening. Massive amounts of peasantry were being dispossessed of lands and forced into urban slums. Cities grew something like 10x in a single generation. This wasn't really the fault of the industrial revolution but because of really bad policy.

(BTW, this period in England when wages and quality of life backslid is now called "Engels' Pause" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engels%27_pause)