"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair

This book was the first best-seller of an author who repeatedly used fiction for social crusades; much later he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Jurgis emigrates from Lithuania with his family and the family of his bride-to-be near the start of the 1900s. They seek work in the meat-packing district of Chicago and are easy prey to the robber-baron capitalist practices of the time. Those who are lucky enough to find employment (including underage children) are forced to work in appalling conditions, for little better than zero-hours contracts. They are repeatedly cheated by mortgage brokers. Every sickness is a calamity, there being no health insurance and no sick pay. Misery after misery is inflicted upon them. Hunger, starvation, illness and death attend them Just when you think that things might be looking up a little, another hammer blow knocks them down. 

Visceral in both senses of the word. If you want misery fiction, this is it. I naively expected that the book would pivot at the half-way mark when Jurgis goes to jail but there is still plenty of misery yet to come.

The style is mostly hyper-realism with lots of objective reportage (the author worked for seven weeks undercover in the meat-processing industry). The final section of the book becomes a socialist tract. There are moments of Victorian melodrama ("she lay cold and still - she was gone - she was gone!"; Ch 19). In some ways it is in the tradition of Dickens's early novels such as Oliver Twist which exposed workhouses and Nicholas Nickleby which exposed private schools but this book is much harder-hitting and has correspondingly less romantic story-line.

It reminded me in many ways of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a much less hard-hitting (and much lighter) but still fundamentally socialist contemporary novel set in the building trade in England.

Love and Mr Lewisham by H G Wells also has socialist ideas put into the mouth of one of the characters. 

The Jungle was instrumental in causing the public outcry that let to acts protecting consumers from dodgy food products.

It does, however, contain anti-Semitic and racist remarks; its casual assumption of racist attitudes is typical of its time.

Selected quotes:

• "His notes are never true, and his fiddle buzzes on the low ones and squeaks and scratches on the high" (Ch 1)
• "She had a feeling that she was getting something for nothing ... she was getting the better of a world that was getting the better of her in so many other ways." (Ch 1)
• "There have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by Malthus in the books and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief fund in time of famine." (Ch 5)
• "In Russia one thought of the government as an affliction like the lightning and the hail." (Ch 9)
• "'Duck, little brother, duck,' the wise old peasants would whisper; 'everything passes away'." (Ch 9)
• "Human beings writhed and fought and fell upon each other like wolves in a pit ... and humanity was festering and stewing and wallowing in its own corruption." (Ch 17)
• "She was standing upon the brink of the pit of hell and throwing in snow balls to lower the temperature." (Ch 21)
• "So he went on, tearing up all the flowers from the garden of his soul, and setting his heel upon them." (Ch 22)
• "Men at the death-grapple with the demon powers of hunger and cold!" (Ch 23)
• "It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same." (Ch 25)
• "There is one kind of prison where the man is behind the bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside." (Ch 27)
• "When people are starving ... and they have anything with a price, they ought to sell it." (Ch 27)
• "Marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation of the sex pleasure. The difference between them was a difference of class. If a woman had money she might dictate her own terms: equality, a life contract, and the legitimacy - that is the property rights - of her children. If she had no money ... she sold herself for an existence." (Ch 31)

Hugely realistic, full of squalor and misery. Jack London called it the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery". Bertolt Brecht later wrote a play in which Saint Joan was transported to the Chicago stockyards.

February 2023; 410 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God