Victorian England is characterised by the full development of the Industrial Revolution. England became the first industrial nation in the world and, by 1850, the first nation to have more people ① employed in industry than in agriculture. Expanding trade coincided with the growth of the Empire and brought great wealth to Britain, but this wealth was not ② evenly distributed. Many enterprising individuals (the ‘self-made men’) rose from humble origins to positions of wealth and influence, but large sections of the working class ③ were forced into the overcrowded slums of large cities where they worked long hours for low wages in unhealthy conditions. The manufacturing towns of the north of England provided some of the worst examples and ④ inspired such socially conscious novels as Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, and Dickens’s Hard Times. In the south there was London, already the largest city in the world, showing all the crime, evil, and misery ⑤ whose result from overpopulation and unplanned growth.