A popular way of thinking about history goes something like this: Society is a train that travels along an inevitable, one-way track. As it hurtles ceaselessly forward, progress is made.

We once believed that the sun revolved around the earth, before rightly conceding the error of our ways and embracing heliocentrism. We once allowed black people to be kept as chattel, subjected regularly to torture and rape. But then we learned that slavery was wrong. We once hired children to toil in dangerous mines and factories, where they lost eyes and limbs and succumbed early to occupational diseases like black lung. But we abolished child labor because we know better now.

Yes, things just keep getting better and better. And nowhere does this view of history as an inevitable, one-way progress train seem more evident than in the collective imagining of Victorian poverty, which has become a sort of shorthand for gratuitous cruelty and squalor. We tut-tut at the society our unenlightened forebears built, at the workhouse of Oliver Twist and the overcrowded tenement of Jacob Riis. We sure have come a long way, we tell ourselves.