The Role Of Child Labor In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

The early twentieth century was a ferocious time, though we can't immediately think of a time in American history that has been peaceful. Upton Sinclair, in his novel, The Jungle, an expose of the meatpacking industry, became an enormous bestseller translated into seventeen languages within weeks of its publication in 1906. But while The Jungle has long been associated with food production, the book is actually a much broader critique of early twentieth-century business and labor practices in the rapidly growing cities of the United States. The Jungle is the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his family, Lithuanian immigrants who come to America to work in the meatpacking plants of Chicago. Their story is a story of hardship. They face enormous difficulties: harsh and dangerous working conditions, poverty and starvation, unjust
It features poverty, the absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness that's widespread among the lower classes of society, while the upper classes are corrupted. Sinclair had spent seven weeks in Chicago researching through personal experience the nature of labor, gives a firsthand account of many aspects of the life of labor in the Gilded Age, including examples of child labor. He describes the practices of children working in factories and children going into the city to sell newspapers to help support their family. The story of "little Stanislovas" in The Jungle depicts the horrid nature of child factory labor. Stanislovas is packed off to a factory to help his family pay rent on the house. He is firstly taken to a priest to obtain a certificate "to the effect that he was two years older than he was" to avoid conflict with the "law" on minimum working age. Stanislovas, upon arrival at the factory entrance, is eagerly ushered into the factory and given a