> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The ‘Good Old Days’ Weren’t - URL: https://goodoil.news/the-good-old-days-werent-2/ - Published: 2026-10-31T19:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-31T18:59:59.000Z - Description: Pre-industrial life was miserable, dirty and all too short. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: History “Anyone pining for the ‘Good Old Days’ of the 19th century,” **H G Wells** once wrote, “would change their mind as soon as they got their first toothache.” The existence of analgesia is just one of the myriad modern devices we wouldn’t know we missed until we didn’t have them. Plentiful food, clean water and more entertainment than an emperor could have enjoyed, all available to even the poorest of us without even leaving the homes that would make even our grandparents weep with envy. Yet there is a dedicated and vocal – and politically powerful – cabal determined to try and force us to live in the pre-industrial past. An Arcadian past that never existed. The grim truth is that, even until the 20th century, life for all but the wealthiest people in the West was an unimaginable misery of toil and deprivation. > [Many people imagine](https://humanprogress.org/the-preindustrial-past-was-a-horror-story/?ref=goodoil.news) that those centuries of near stagnation before the GFP hockey-stick chart’s upswing were probably a pretty nice time to be alive. Some lament how much the modern world has supposedly cost us, insisting that before the Industrial Revolution people enjoyed a simpler life rooted in agriculture: a stable, peaceful age of happy villagers in cozy cottages, eating wholesome food straight from the farm, dancing around maypoles as their rosy-cheeked children skipped alongside them. Picture the Shire from The Lord of the Rings, but with taller residents. > > Tragically, reality bore no resemblance to this fantasy. In her recent historical broadside, [*The Grim Old Days*](https://www.amazon.com/Grim-Old-Days-Introduction-Preindustrial-ebook/dp/B0H732D29B?ref=goodoil.news), **Chelsea Follett** takes a sledgehammer to this twee pastoral myth beloved of inner-city Green voting classes and romantic reactionaries alike. The pre-industrial record was not a bucolic tapestry of honest blacksmiths merrily tippling mead before pristine timber cottages – it was an unrelenting charnel house of filth, starvation and premature death. > Around half of all children died before adulthood, hunger was common, average life expectancy was in the 30s, and barely one in 10 people were literate. Peasants doing subsistence farm work made up most of the population. Most people’s lives were defined by exhausting labor from sunup to sundown, poor hygiene, aching teeth, flea-bitten skin, threadbare clothes, and the stench of improperly disposed human waste, with toxic air blackened by hearth smoke. Consider the environmental fairy tale peddled by contemporary climate scolds who insist that our ancestors lived in harmonious communion with Mother Gaia. Long before coal began feeding steam engines, medieval and early modern Europeans had happily clear-felled old-growth forests to stoke their hearths and build merchant hulls, forcing Britain to haul timber from across the Atlantic just to keep the realm afloat. Even with a toolkit unchanged since the Paleolithic, the Māori and the Aborigines cleared vast swathes of forest and altered ecologies forever. In the pre-modern cities of the civilised world, municipal rivers were little more than slow-moving, open-air cesspools choked with human nightsoil and slaughterhouse offal. People swilled ale and cider from dawn to dusk not out of festive joviality, but because swallowing a cup of untreated river water was a reliable method of contracting fatal dysentery. Germ theory might have been centuries away, but they were smart enough to notice that people who drank ales, which had been prepared by boiling the water, were far less likely to turn into human fountains of filth. Then consider the medical chamber of horrors. If you had the misfortune to fall ill, the local physician was far more likely to finish you off than cure you. Surgery was a butchery performed on conscious victims held down by strapping lads while a sawbones hacked away with unwashed instruments. The sovereign remedy for every affliction, from consumption to melancholy, was to drain pints of your blood with leeches until you fainted. It wasn’t until roughly around WWI that seeing a doctor was a better gamble than just sitting it out and hoping for the best. Yet today, pampered bourgeois activists, who have never had to dig a ditch, empty a chamber pot or bury three infant siblings, comfortably mock the fruits of industrial capitalism. They churn out internet memes scoffing at the famous ‘hockey-stick’ chart of economic growth and sneering that ‘line go up’ is merely a trick of corporate balance sheets. They take for granted that an ordinary ear infection or scratch from a rusty nail is no longer a potential death sentence. They forget that the rising line on that GDP chart represents small children surviving scarlet fever, running water that doesn’t poison the drinker, lighting which doesn’t fill your lungs with soot, central heating that banishes damp and the unprecedented luxury of spending one’s youth receiving an education rather than breaking stones from age six. Industrialisation did not introduce suffering into an Eden. It rescued ordinary humanity from the perpetual squalor that had been the default condition of our species since the Fall. The real horror story this Halloween is not some gothic spook, but the wilful, ungrateful ignorance of modern zealots eager to drag us back to the muck and darkness of the grim old days. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**