Why is it, do you think, that poverty in cities is often so much more squalid and unpleasant than the same thing in rural areas? I suppose in part because in cities it is so concentrated.
Poverty in the country isn't very pretty, but easier to overlook if the countryside is beautiful. How many cities can be said to be "beautiful", and equal to even the sight of looking across a small valley with a stream at the bottom, and the hills covered in autumn colors? Not many, I would suggest.
Tolkien rightly lamented the encroachment of modernity getting nearer to his beloved countryside, which was mostly agricultural, with small towns thrown in. Did the earlier hunter-gatherers lament the clearing of their endless forests for the tidy farms? Probably, but that was the price of developing more "carrying capacity" that freed more people from spending all their waking hours searching for food, allowing for the surplus energy to be spent on arts, crafts, and industry.
While I love the countryside, and it's still out there, only further away, I know industrialization has been the greatest blessing for the animal I love best, the horse. Prior to the internal combustion engine, the life of most horses was "nasty, brutal, and short", to one extent or another. Horses were organic mobile power sources, and even though expensive, had to be "used", and "used up". And that was in civilian life. Outside of the parade ground, the life of the horse was harder in the military, especially in wartime.
I'm glad that those cars, nasty diesel trucks, and military vehicles have allowed us to "downgrade" the horse to the status of a pet. After being man's chief source of military and farming muscle for 5000 years, it's a well-earned rest. So sometimes that smoke-belching technology brings good with it, too.
Secondly, the urban poor of the industrial era had to make a giant change in their mentality regarding time: they were regimented and "on the clock" in the city. They had to work all the time, often in appalling conditions which were psychologically trying, and tedious in the extreme.
Rural poor, in contrast, did not live "on the clock", but rather, according to the seasons, and although the work was physically demanding, it was not monotonous or boring or madeningly tedious like that of the factories. And the work was episodic; when there were no crops to plant or to harvest, as happened throughout the year, one had free time. Whereas the urban factory worker had no free time, initially, except a little in the evenings, and on Sundays; his work schedule paid no attention to the changing of the seasons. He was tied to it willy nilly
Not that rural poverty was fun; check out the foreign language film (Swedish or Danish; not sure which) "Pele the Conqueror" with Max von Sydow. If you didn't own or rent your own land, and were just a paid laborer, things were pretty bad indeed.