Dickens is really great. You can find plenty of good stuff in his work. For example this passge from Oliver Twist (Chapter 2 "Treats of Oliver Twist's growth, education, and board.)":
The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered -- the poor people liked it!
It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work.
"Oho!" said the board, looking very knowing; "we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all, in no time." So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it.
With this view, they contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays.
They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor!
There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under these two last heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people.
For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of the increase in the undertaker's bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two's gruel. But the number of workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were in ecstasies.
Dickens never fully recovered from his family going broke and sending him to work as a child. Even in his American Sketches he felt compelled to write about the poor...
David Graham Phillips' "Susan Lenox, Her Rise and Fall" (1908 published 1917) and Theodore Drieser's "Sister Carrie" (1900) are about women of that time that were held in scorn, well that is in the case of Phillips because the main character was a girl born out of wedlock and no one would relalycut her a break because if it, but both books, the authors from time to time sort of retreat into a "Dobie Gillis" outside person style narrative on how the lower classes had to live and get by. "Lenox..." (parts of the book almost had me in tears and would be a good antidote for any "randroids" out there) was a true eye opener for me and although some of the conditions are mitigated in today's world, many of that still exists in one for or another and I fear a lot of these economic policies along with the undoing of many reform the Progressives of 100 years ago,we could return to some sort of a world like that. I think for honorable mention, I would list Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Stephen Crane where some of their works addrss those problems too.