They were not. In brief, we know this because of both individual accounts -- people were quite verbal about preferring the life of an independent peasant to that of the 'servant-like' factory worker -- and aggregate demographic trends, which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible.

Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.