The Victorian engineers took pride in engineering, it was an era when progress was been made month on month they applied sheer craftsmanship to a lot of what they did (in a similar way to the famous quote from Steve Jobs[1]).

[1] - “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” - Steve Jobs

If you go to the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology, they have cotton looms that have doric columns - there is no earthly reason for that (indeed today we'd use tubular or box section) other than the sheer joy of doing it.

It must have been a hell of a thing to have been alive from 1860 to 1930 (if we exclude all the negatives).

Why don't we settle for just straight lines and pure utilitarianism in our homes today and still insist on decorating them? We spend about as much awake time at work as home. Why did business stop caring about what was thought within the community, or by the workers?

Sure, some was projecting success, or the confidence of their age, but there seems to have been an expectation things would last. As an awful lot has. Half of many city's buildings are well past a century, little built post-war is likely to get that far.

It was an age where they were trying to leave things better - to their definition of better. Now it seems we're in an age of leaving things cheapened, not necessarily cheaper, but more profitable.

I'm not a fan of the current lowest cost beats all fashion.