One Hundred Years Ago ($2.01)

It all depends on your prospective:

Take Violet Bonham Carter, for example, in her Churchill biography:

"It was a time of booming trade, of great prosperity and wealth in which the pageant of London society took place year after year in a setting of traditional dignity and beauty. The great houses -- Devonshire, Dorchester, Grosvenor, Stafford and Lansdowne House -- had not yet been converted into museums, hotels and flats, and there we danced through the long summer nights till dawn. The great country houses still flourished in their glory and on their lawns in the green shade of trees the art of human intercourse was exquisitely practiced by men and women not yet enslaved by household cares and chores who stil had time to read, to talk, to listen and to think."

Nice, huh?

But Samuel Chotzinoff, in his memoirs "A Lost Paradise" did not see it that way from his perspective as a young boy newly arrived in America:

"The world was most probably the same for everybody. We knew that rich people had more rooms, better food and clothing, and easier lives than the poor; but we had no reason to believe that their lot was otherwise different, or that they were exempt from what we believed to be the universal afflictions. On the visible world, half of which we knew first hand, and the other have of which we could only imagine, there were, for us, certain unchangeable phenomena: children were dirty and were obliged to scratch their heads; mothers were unkempt and slatternly; everybody, old and young, had teeth pulled regularly, so that middle-aged and old people had few, if any teeth; a great many children died young; everybody slept in underwear; parents always quarreled; mothers were generally indulgent to their children, but fathers either kept aloof or were brutal to them. And, of course, everyone over fourteen years of age was employed in gainful labor."