"Great material progress at a huge social cost"---discuss this view of Victorian Britian

Victorian Britain, with its Empire on which the sun never set, was to a large degree the global superpower of the 19th century. In this period Britain consolidated its place at the center of European power politics and sustained, on the whole, its position as the world’s most dynamic economy. The period also witnessed the dawning of democracy and major developments in science, technology, organized sport, culture and social policy. Victoria oversaw England at the height of its overseas power and it reached its greatest expanse under her. Things did not start off smoothly, however.
No period of British History has been as tense, as politically and socially disturbed, as the 1830s and early 1840s, when both the working class and the middle class, separately or in conjunction, demanded what they regarded as fundamental changes. From 1829 to 1832 their discontents fused in the demand for Parliamentary Reform, behind which the masses threw their riots and demonstrations, the busines...