You should check out the 4-part audio lecture series by Robert LeFevre for some good info on the subject.
Those were luxuries compared to starving in the street. According to LeFevre, the masses (about 90% of the population in England, compared to 2% aristocracy and 8% guild members who served the aristocracy) lived in unimaginable poverty – kids sent out into the world as adults at age 8, eating on average a bowl of meatless soup every other day, sleeping in feces-ridden streets, et al. No one could hunt or farm because the king owned all the land and had no problem killing poachers and tresspassers. In a world where 1 cent was enough to buy room and board for a week, getting paid 1 cent a day was like heaven – no wonder men would ask if there were positions for their wives and kids as well!
All regulations did was to codify changes implemented by factory owners themselves, as the standards of living improved, since they had to compete for workers. They weren’t slaves who could be worked to death, they were free workers who could leave at any time.
Guilds, which characterized the small artisan sector in feudal times, are monopolies. It was the advent of the factory that broke up those monopolies. In any case, a monopoly can only exist with state guns to exclude competitors, so it was a problem CAUSED by governments and not solved by them.
They weren’t bad. LeFevre explains that all of these myths originated with the Sadler Report, an investigation for the king into factory conditions. Sadler was heavily biased and didn’t interview any factory owners or visit any factories, he just went to people with axes to grind and collected all their complaints then presented it as his report. The king himself threw out that report 3 years later (after many complaints by factory owners) and commissioned a new report that completely contradicted the Sadler Report. The problem is that history only remembers the Sadler Report and the newest one was ignored.
A book that should be more well known:
Capitalism and the Historians by F.A. Hayek (Ed.)
Monopolies are only possible when government intervenes. If the factories gain a majority share of the shoemaking market, it’s because more consumers want their product versus the artisans’. This is like when people claim that department store chains are evil because they drive the mom-and-pop stores out of business. Well, perhaps, but what about the increase in living standards because everyone can now buy super-cheap goods?
The horrors of England’s industrial life in the last century furnish a standing brief for addicts of positive intervention. Child-labour and woman-labour in the mills and mines; Coketown and Mr. Bounderby; starvation wages; killing hours; vile and hazardous conditions of labour; coffin ships officered by ruffians – all these are glibly charged off by reformers and publicists to a regime of rugged individualism, unrestrained competition, and laissez-faire. This is an absurdity on its face, for no such regime ever existed in England. They were due to the State’s primary intervention whereby the population of England was expropriated from the land; due to the State’s removal of the land from competition with industry for labour. Nor did the factory system and the “industrial revolution” have the least thing to do with creating those hordes of miserable beings. When the factory system came in, those hordes were already there, expropriated, and they went into the mills for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Plugson of Undershot would give them, because they had no choice but to beg, steal or starve. Their misery and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith’s economics are not the economics of individualism; they are the economics of landowners and mill-owners. Our zealots of positive intervention would do well to read the history of the Enclosures Acts and the work of the Hammonds, and see what they can make of them.
Capitalism and the Historians looks like what you are looking for. I cant find the PDF so I suppose these articles based on it will have to do.
The Myths of Capitalism’s History
Also a longer more detailed article by Tom Woods on the same topic
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/a-myth-shattered-mises-hayek-and-the-industrial-revolution/
Also here is a reading list of decent histories of the Industral Revolution