Why do I choose to stay here? Why don't I move to the countryside and find work as a farmhand or maid? Surely it's better than London!?

Cities like London and other bustling metropolises of the 1800s were seeing an enormous influx of labourers from rural Britain. These people weren't idiots, and they weren't leaving the countryside because they were wanting a break from their bucolic rural bliss by all cramming into a grotty urban shitpit.

They left behind a life that was, for many of those who had agricultural jobs, one of extreme physical hardship and often indescribably poor living standards in damp, undermaintained houses under the whims of their landowner.

Those in the domestic service sector had a life of very long hours with often poor pay, and sometimes the denigration of employers who knew the job market was skewed in their favor: Maids were ten a penny, and although not all homeowners were tyrants, some did view staff as their own personal property, which sometimes could extend even into the realms of sexual abuse and coercion.

And that's just for the ones who had jobs: British agriculture of that period reached it's real zenith of productivity during the Napoleonic wars, and with the outbreak of peace begins a slow but inexorable decline. Britain was emerging as an industrial and mercantile nation, with a hungry urban population beginning to outstrip the ability of the countryside to feed them, with the shortfall being made up by increased dependence of imported foreign food, especially of wheat from the vast grainbelts of North America and Russia.

British agriculture, less able to compete, begins abandoning cultivated marginal land and shifts more towards a lower input pastoral bent in all but the most fertile and open areas in order to produce higher value products (beef, milk, butter etc) for relatively lower effort and expense. Agricultural improvement techniques start to raise yields but also bring increased mechanisation and reduced manpower requirements alongside a dearth of available work in an increasingly depressed agricultural economy. Combined with events such as successive poor harvests contributing to the "hungry 30s", smokey industrial conurbations look far more appealing than the utterly demeaning conditions of rural poorhouses: Living conditions are pretty bad in both places, but urban zones have vastly more work available to make ends meet.

What also has to be said is that London is, frankly, more interesting than the countryside. There's the emergence of leisure time in the 19th century, theatres and music halls are everywhere, and the chance to have a casual sexual partner is far greater than a rural village. The 19th century was a time of mass exodus to the cities in Britain because even the slums were more vibrant and offered more chances for work than the dying agricultural sector. Finding a spouse, if you were of a mind, was harder in rural areas, as your choices were limited to the people in your village, maybe a few neighbouring ones. Rural crafts were on their way out with the Industrial Revolution, and your options were just widely expanded in the cities. And, frankly, disease and filth were everywhere. Farms weren't bucolic pastoral wonderlands -- they were covered in animal waste, human waste, and all kinds of disease-causing agents. The cities offered chances for improvement, and chance for autonomy rather than being locked into farming or domestic service.

Ruth Goodman's work on Victorian life gives a really solid look at these choices and how they affected the daily life of Victorian Britons, as well as being an excellent read.