Imagine a house with no ventilation or light, no fireplace, toilet, or running water; damp and freezing in winter, stifling in summer, and liable to flooding from time to time. Compared to it, even a stable with hay and a floor that did not leak water would be cleaner. Would you go without food or drink for ten years to save up and buy such a house?
Property prices in emerging industrial cities naturally could not compare to London's. Even with the massive influx of people, they had merely grown from "towns" into large cities, while London had become a cosmopolitan metropolis of two million people, even surpassing Paris. Yet London at the time was full of slums, breeding grounds for disease and crime.
In fact, cholera broke out in London not long after the Great Exhibition opened at the Crystal Palace. But this time, Malfoy did not open an inn during the "Blue Death" as his ancestors had. They were trying to recoup their losses.
The Malfoy family's principal lands lay in Wiltshire, a golden tract of land, but it was in the countryside, far from industrial cities. With the repeal of the Corn Laws, families like theirs suffered devastating losses. Besides recovering some of those losses through animal husbandry, they exchanged part of their land for urban land development rights. Those who acquired land in Wiltshire built estates in the picturesque countryside.
If farmers had not gone bankrupt and become landless laborers, who would leave the tranquil countryside described by Jane Austen to crowd into dirty, unsafe urban slums, sharing a house with dozens of people?
Mercantilism was practiced during Elizabeth I's reign, and she encouraged the Enclosure Movement. Naturally, "injustices" were bound to occur in the course of such business. Even if they were not as obvious