Reviews with content warning for Animal death - The Jungle

It hits you over the head like the sledgehammer blows of the ‘knockers’ employed to stun the ten thousand heads of cattle that passed through the doors of the Chicago abattoirs each day.

Upton Sinclair weaves a heartbreaking tale of human endurance in the face of the unendurable conditions facing early 20th century immigrants pursuing the American Dream.

It starts with the wedding of Jurgis and Ona Rudkus- an event which they put themselves into debt for in a desperate attempt to cling respectfully to the traditions of the old country. Even knowing what comes for the family next, you can’t begrudge them for this, their one real night of happiness, in which Sinclair draws a scene so vivid that you’re almost there dancing with the Lithuanian diaspora amongst the drunken uncles and fussing aunts, caught up in the whirl of Tamoszius’ fiddle. This is the scene that everything else contrasts with: by the end of the novel

Tamoszius will be maimed and unable to play music any longer; Marija, the life and soul of the party keeping the wedding festivities going will be addicted to heroin and forced into sex work; and Ona, our bride, will die painfully in childbirth before she reaches the age of 18.

This brief summary doesn’t even begin to cover how bleak this novel is, however.

In the same way that George Orwell successfully disguised himself as a tramp whilst researching Down and Out in Paris and London, Sinclair had little difficulty ingratiating himself with Chicago’s working class immigrant communities that allowed him to observe what conditions were like first hand. Rather than cosplaying poverty, both authors weave a devastatingly vivid picture of everyday life and its hardships to the extent that you can’t help but feel every bitter snap of cold and smell the sort of place that values life so little that a man can work himself to death, fall into a pit and be processed into a block of pure leaf lard without anyone batting an eyelid.

It’s hard to imagine the impact that the Jungle had on American society at the time: middle class pearl clutching meant that foreign sales of American meat halved in 1906, the year of the book’s publication.

The Food and Drug Administration was set up in its wake and Roosevelt himself personally wrote to Sinclair. And yet, so many of the Jungle’s themes remain depressingly relevant.

One of the first things I noticed was the housing arrangements for newly arrived immigrants. In 2019 Beth O’Leary published the Flatshare which Paramount then turned into a quirky romcom about a London couple who fall in love after renting a room in shifts because neither can afford to pay the full amount of rent. To quote Sinclair:

“it was not unusual for two men to own the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Very frequently a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double
shifts of men.”

Furthermore, the Chicago river of the 1900’s is nothing but a festering open sewer which bubbles with the rotting entrails entrails discharged there from the packing yards.
Compare this with George Monbiot’s description of a recent trip to our own River Wye:

“In hot weather, the entire river stinks of chicken shit, from the 10 million birds being reared in the catchment. We made the mistake of swimming in it: I almost gagged when I smelled the water. The free-range farms are the worst: the birds carpet the fields with their highly reactive dung, which is then washed into the catchment by rain. Several times a year, algal blooms now turn the clear river cloudy. The fish gasp for breath. Aquatic insects suffocate.”

(The government is looking the other way while Britain's rivers die before our eyes | George Monbiot | The Guardian)

I could go on. About BSE; about the mass slaughter of day-old male chicks in the egg laying industry; about the fact that we’ve engineered chickens to grow 5x faster than they did in the 1950s to the extent that factory farmed chickens physically cannot live outside their intended lifespan before dying of respiratory failure from unnatural weight gain. About the fact that broiler chicken bones go hand in hand with nuclear isotopes in the geological record to indicate the Anthropocene- our human age of climate change and mass extinction.

Once Jurgis’ redemptive arc leads him to discover socialism he finds it “so painfully obvious […] so incomprehensible how a man could fail to see” what he sees, which is what I imagine many veggies/vegans feel about meat eaters like me after having reading this book. I’m sorry to say that it hasn’t personally put me off the occasional bacon sandwich. Maybe my next read should be George Monbiot’s Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet.

Not since I first watched Threads or saw Francis Bacon’s Screaming Popes have I had such vivid nightmares.
By the end of the novel I was playing content warning bingo and it really does contain the whole spectrum of human misery.

And yet- I enjoyed it.
Not just as an important piece of history but as a novel in its own right. I stayed up late tensely reading chapter after chapter willing our protagonist on. Unfortunately it falters at the end slightly when Jurgis miraculously discovers socialism and the last two chapters become a party political pamphlet. Apparently Sinclair hit a brick wall whilst writing and rushed the ending and it shows. There’s nothing wrong with the theory he espouses, it’s just that as a polemicist he is not as subtle or as nuanced as Orwell (could anyone be?) but this can be overlooked as the sheer humanity he brings to a suffering underclass is worthy of being up there with Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole or even anything Orwell ever wrote.

Many far cleverer people than I have recorded their thoughts on the Jungle. However, the fact it was published 118 years ago means that it’s out of copyright and can be downloaded easily and read by anyone which is exactly what Upton Sinclair, in dedicating his novel to ‘the workingmen of America’, would have wanted.

Content Warnings

sellnow_hannah's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.75

This is a historically important book and was fascinating to see what was included in the original compared to the cut/censored edition that was published. I was initially very invested in the story up until the later sections when the plot seems to end in favor of long socialist speeches. Would have preferred to keep these messages interspersed throughout the book rather than the speech/debate format that was presented. I found myself surprised after reading this that the main message people got from this book was of food safety issues when the focus was clearly on the plight of the poor immigrant family. Worth a read for the historical context but certainly not a favorite for me.

Content Warnings

mentalish's review against another edition

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dark sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

The Uncle Tom's Cabin of the guided age, which shows the brutality of the system of laissez faire capitalism. This book is becoming more relevant by the day as some people in the US government seek to remove most pro-worker regulations, taking the US backwards to an era of history that should never be repeated.

Content Warnings