I just came across this very interesting comment on the difference between bread in England and the United States in the 1890s. The writer, Helen Campbell, goes to England to look for recipes for a cookbook she is writing. She notes that English breads were dense compared with American breads of the period. The American bread style is described as a “light, sweet, tender” in contrast to dense English breads. As light, sweet, tender is the hallmark of 20th century American mass market breads, I think that this 1890s description of the American bread style of that time supports the notion that factory breads were popular, in part, because they reflected a bread style already appreciated by a mass market.
So is it with English pastry, till the lighter hand of the French cook has taught them what flakiness means. Dripping is the favorite shortening for all ordinary cakes and pies, and suet for dumplings, and thus comes a solidity of structure which, to the Englishman, means a substantial money’sworth. His bread is of the same order. Not once in the length and breadth of England was the light, sweet, tender bread of good American housekeeping to be discovered. In toast it was fairly good, but as bread and butter, a thing to be tolerated, since bread must be, but never heartily enjoyed.
In Foreign Kitchens: With Choice Recipes from England, France, Germany. Helen Campbell, 1893
William Rubel 
Culture uber alles! I am sure most British consumers would have found their bread ‘heartily enjoyable.’ As so often happens, the personal taste preferences of a writer may colour subsequent views of a food or dish.
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This is exactly right. Good an bad bread are ideas that exist in culture. The only proviso I will add to that is that there is well and poorly crafted bread. For example, while I won’t get down on soft white factory breads, it is always shocking to me to open a loaf to find that one can see swirl marks — swirls of unmixed flour in the slices. I have found this often enough to understand that in some factories they are cutting corners, even within the context of maximizing industrial efficiency. One would think they could always at least mix the dough enough!
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