I've been reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I read this book when I was a teenager, but at Christmas time when I was ordering gifts from Amazon, I noticed that there was an "uncensored original edition," so I bought it.

Naturally, as with all classics, there is an introduction written by a Sinclair scholar. It was interesting to read how the manuscript was discovered, the struggle to get it into print, the differences between the two versions, and what motivated the changes. However, now that I am about 75% finished with the book, I have a different interpretation than the one advanced in the introduction.

There it is argued that this version, which is still the teacher's standard, was too watered down to have much political impact, even if it did result in numerous reforms to the meat packing industry because people were shocked that food might be unsafe. But the introduction asserts that much of the political message was erased by the way the book was edited (by Sinclair, under duress), and so it did little to advance his socialist agenda.

Before I started reading, I remembered that the book was about the meat-packing industry in Chicago at the turn of the 20th Century, and that the main characters were immigrants with tragic lives. Probably the things I most clearly remembered were that in order to keep her job, the main female character was forced to be the mistress of her boss, and that she died in childbirth. I even distinctly remembered a sentence from the book, about the bloodspot on the floor where she had died.

I am pretty sure that I read The Jungle originally when I was in tenth grade in high school, as part of English class. We had what the school called "selectives" at that time; after taking ninth grade English, students could freely choose six electives to complete the four years of required English. (I think this idea didn't work out, and has been replaced by traditional English 10, 11 and 12 since then.) One of the first selectives I chose was The Novel; two of the other books we read were Giants in the Earth by Ole Rolvaag and My Antonia by Willa Cather.

It was a class that left me with several vivid memories, but not because the teacher or even the reading list were especially noteworthy. It was filled with kids from the popular clique, and most were a year or two older than me - the class did not attract sophomores. Many of the students either did not read or were otherwise clueless, but since they were popular, the teacher (who took every opportunity to be favored among the cliques) liked them anyway. But then the teacher was no genius, I recall that while we were reading Giants in the Earth, he made a remark about male and female oxen! I may have been the only student to catch his mistake, and I remember it hitting me like a thunderbolt that there was a lot teachers didn't know. (I'm not exactly sure why it took until I was 15 to figure that one out.)

In the introduction of the "uncensored" edition it says that although made by the author and not the publisher, the cuts were not done for artistic reasons, but to make the book less controversial. Certainly there is evidence for this (the packing house names were altered to make them even less similar to their real life counterparts), but I am not so sure there were not also valid literary reasons for the changes. Several chapters were cut, and now that I am getting to the end, I believe the book would benefit from some trimming. I am starting to lose interest in the story. Another insight from the introduction, that the socialist message was toned down by the cutting. This may be true, but even as a teenager, the strong socialist viewpoint was not lost to me in the shorter version. It did spark many reforms in the industry; that is quite an accomplishment for any book. Expecting a novel to result in a proletarian revolution is really pushing it, I think! Art does not exist in a vacuum; there were many other agendas at that time competing for air space.

Finally, the introduction states that the editing makes the characters seem less sympathetic. On this point I completely disagree. I do remember this problem with the book from my first reading, but the characters are not more sympathetic to me in the longer version; if anything, the excess description has the opposite effect. I believe the author himself did not identify with the characters. They were simply a tool in his political tract. He seemed to glory in making the characters ignorant. He does not allow the reader to figure things out and draw conclusions; instead he endlessly preaches his message, telling readers how they should feel about the events.

Also, he described the characters in ways that make the reader have no choice but to dislike them -- for example, all except the mother did not care much when one of the children, who was handicapped, died. Then, meat packing is awful. Not only are the sanitary conditions deplorable, which he demonstrated in disgusting detail, but the very nature of the employment is cruelty. This makes it hard to feel empathetically towards the employees. So, all in all, it has been a worthwhile read, but I don't think this version had a different impact on me than the other one did. [Note to students who land here from surfing for information on this book: Don't you dare plagiarize.]