Facing The Jungle: Censorship and Working Class Literature
Session Coordinator: Kathleen De Grave
Dept. of English, Pittsburg State University
Pittsburg, KS 66762
kdegrave@pittstate.edu

Censoring Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—the Second Time Around

When the editors of the socialist newspaper The Appeal to Reason sent Upton Sinclair to Chicago in 1904 to do research on the meatpacking industry, no one could imagine the firestorm of controversy that would surround The Jungle. Sinclair’s novel shocked and horrified the nation when it was published in 1906. Few people knew that Sinclair had to heavily censor the original version that had appeared in The Appeal, in order to get it published by a commercial publisher. Three quarters of a century later, librarian & archivist Gene DeGruson discovered correspondence between Sinclair and The Appeal editors that led him to realize that there were really two very different versions of The Jungle. DeGruson’s efforts to get the original 1905 Appeal edition published ended disastrously. This 1988 publication turned into a comedy of errors. And only now is the original version available in the new See Sharp Press edition. My paper will discuss the roadblocks to publication that Sinclair’s original version has run into both then and now.

Editing the Jungle out of The Jungle

The study of working class literature is just beginning. One important issue is how such literature has been influenced both by the prejudices of the middle class and by the demands of publishers. In 2003, the original version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was reprinted, only the second time this has been done since the novel was first brought out in its revised form in 1906. This new edition of The Jungle allows for a focused discussion of the ways literature about the working class has been altered and censored by publishers and by writers themselves. Sinclair radically changed the imagery, rhetoric, and characterization in his novel in order to get it published in 1906. In effect (and literally), he edited the jungle, as metaphor and vision, out of The Jungle. My paper discusses what was lost in that revision and how those changes grew out of specific prejudices toward the working class at the turn of the century.

Kathleen De Grave
Pittsburg State University
kdegrave@pittstate.edu

The influence of the the socialist newspaper The Appeal to Reason on American literature in the decades just after 1900 was significant. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, commissioned and serialized by the Appeal, is one case in point. Literature inspired by the working class during this period was the product of writers shaped by their political environments and their ideological outlooks. The best writing of this period was done by men and women—Sinclair, Jack London, Arturo Giovannitti, John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse, and others—actively engaged in socialist or I.W.W. organizations. These same writers were directly influenced by their experiences in the Chicago stockyards, the nation's coal fields, and elsewhere—experiences often investigated and brought to the nation's attention by The Appeal to Reason.

Randy Roberts
Pittsburg State University
reroberts@pittstate.edu

Speaking for the Working Class: Dickens and Hardy Muted

Despite much journalistic data on the working poor and economic analysis of their plight, there is no traditional canon of literature by the working class themselves. Two writers in the traditional British literary canon who speak for the working class, Dickens and Hardy, are for different reasons suspect. Dickens, hiding his childhood experience of poverty, weaves fantasy and political suppression into his narratives: the poor, with no desire to change the power structure to improve their own lives, simply suffer and are pitied. Even Dickens' famous accounts of severe poverty are censored to be less horrific and less sexually explicit, in order to appease his middle class readers. Though Hardy's message is clearer, and his depiction of the poor is more brutal, he too deals with censorship: from publishers and from the demands of the middle class audience. This paper will look at the ways the working class experience was censored and altered in the novels of Dickens and Hardy. It will also look at one of the newest trends in British Literature: the focus on developing a working class literature written by 19th century Britsh laborers and activists.

Susan Carlson
Pittsburg State University
scarlson@pittstate.edu