I would be interested in hearing an actual historian's opinion on whether conditions were better or worse in England at the height of the British Empire, compared to continental Europe.

I got the impression from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that English workhouses near the end of their life were basically the predecessor of the modern homeless shelter, where visitors would get a single night of accommodation by law. The conditions a century earlier seem to have been truly hellish and tantamount to slavery. I have no idea whether either was better or worse than the rest of the world at the time.