Yes, life in Victorian London was appalling for much of the population. Babies fed cheap gin in their bottles to keep them quiet, poor working men pawning the families meager possessions from week to week, whole families crammed into tiny rooms, illiteracy, out-of-wedlock births, hunger, disease, rampant prostitution, and on and on.
But for many people who didn't live in London or weren't on the bottom of the social rung, live was pretty good. And, yes, and they were the ones who wrote the histories.
And, that's why the "olden days" often look better than today. Because those who had the time, resources and interest wrote history.
Illiterate, hungry folks coughing up a lung from TB and crammed into tiny rooms with drunken kids crawling zig-zags across a cold floor tend not to sit down and write a whole lot.
Henry Mayhew wrote a good book on it that is available free online The London Poor, I believe it is called.