[In the following essay, Dawson examines Winston Churchill's 1906 review of The Jungle to discover the impression, sometimes extreme, Churchill gave of Chicago to his fellow Englishmen.]

The celebrity of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle preceded its appearance in book form. The early fame that derived from its serialization in J. A. Wayland's socialist weekly Appeal to Reason and One-Hoss Philosophy during the preceding year had already brought about the federal government's investigation of the Chicago meat-packing industry.¹ Publication of its very extensively revised text as a book drew the salute of Winston Churchill, then a young Liberal Party member of the House of Commons. That Churchill, whose own political novel Savrola: A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania had been published six years earlier, took the initiative in providing the review is evidence of his sense of kinship with America and his early interest in its politics, maybe even in its literature.

Doubleday, Page of New York published the original American book edition of The Jungle on February 26, 1906. In March Heinemann brought out the London edition that would go through six impressions in the following three months. In mid-June there issued from London the first number of a new weekly, the P.T.O., edited by its founder, the Irish journalist and longtime Member of Parliament for Galway and Liverpool, Thomas Power O'Connor. An essay on the journal's first pages, “The Story of My New Paper: Its Inception and Purpose,” announced the editor's governing philosophy: “If I am asked what is the fundamental idea of the journal I must put it this way: it is to catch and to realise the dramatic in life.”² The statement of policy promised readers that those who wrote for the P.T.O. would represent a wide spectrum of opinion and address a variety of interests. As some earnest of his pledge that “this is not to be a ‘one-man’ paper,” O'Connor called attention to the featured article of the initial issue:

The variety and interest of the articles in this first number will, I hope, be some guarantee of this. Among these papers I may mention the account by Mr. Winston Churchill, M.P., of the American scandals. These articles, I may say, were suggested by Mr. Churchill himself long before there had been any serious notice of the scandals in the American or English Press. Connected in blood through his mother with America, Mr. Churchill keeps a steady and constant eye upon the affairs of that country, and the doings of the Trusts have appealed to him very specially as they are interpreted by him as a proof of the soundness of his economic faith. The story in The Jungle had been tested before we accepted it, and before the Report of the American Commission was made public, by a well-known American lawyer, and by interviews with prominent official inspectors.³

Although the review shows no consciousness of contemporary literary movements and is by later standards over-heavy with plot summary, it pays tribute to the author's powers of description and recognizes the breadth of human appeal that would make The Jungle such an effective agent of change and one of the great bestsellers of all time. Only in the concluding paragraphs, where he faults Sinclair for grounding his critique in a philosophical over-simplification that he finds inadequate for a full understanding of human needs, does Churchill distance himself from the book's passionate indictment of the capitalist structure of American society and its thoroughgoing socialist prescription for reform. Even if he were less than entirely pleased with the review, Sinclair appears to have been very happy to have gained what is on balance the very favorable notice of his English critic. More than once in later life Sinclair expressed his pride at Churchill's show of interest. In the preface he wrote for a 1965 edition of his novel, he recalled Churchill's review in sketching the help he had received from an English critic of the stockyards.

Among my informants at the stockyards had been an English specialist on the subject of packing plants. His name was Adolphe Smith and he was a representative of The Lancet, perhaps the most respected medical journal in the world. He had studied packing plants and written reports on them in Britain and Europe, and he told me that never anywhere had he seen practices so outrageous as he had seen in Chicago. He backed me up in The Lancet, and perhaps that had something to do with the fact that when The Jungle appeared in London, there was published a two-part review of the book by Winston Churchill, at that time a newly elected member of Parliament, in T.P.'s Weekly.⁴

Sinclair had good reason to feel pleased. The future Prime Minister had, after all, volunteered his criticism and done so for the positive purpose he set forth in the sentence with which he opened his review: “When I promised to write a few notes on this book … I had an object—I hoped to make it better known.” Churchill supplied neither a few casual paragraphs nor a conventional piece of puffery; he ventured an extended essay in what writers of the age took for serious literary criticism.

The “few notes” that Churchill originally committed himself to contributing extended into the long review of Sinclair's novel that ran in the June 16 and June 23, 1906, issues of the P.T.O.⁵ The break between its two parts occurs at the end of Section III.⁶ The two installments bear the same heading: “The Chicago Scandals. The Novel which is Making History. By Winston Spencer Churchill, M.P.” Following O'Connor's prefatory paragraph, the text of the review begins as follows:

When I promised to write a few notes on this book for the first number of Mr. O'Connor's new paper, I had an object—I hoped to make it better known. In the weeks that have passed that object has disappeared. The book has become famous. It has arrested the eye of a warm-hearted autocrat; it has agitated the machinery of a State department; and having passed out of the sedate columns of the reviewer into leading articles and “latest intelligence,” has disturbed in the Old World and the New the digestions, and perhaps the consciences, of mankind.

I

Mr. Upton Sinclair is one of that active band of reformers, comprising some men of very great gifts and some men of very great wealth, whose energies are now directed in the United States to no less a task than the destruction or bodily capture of the Democratic party and the installation in its place of a thorough and unshrinking Socialist organisation. His book is a tract in a swelling political agitation, and it takes the form of an indictment of the huge meat-packing business on the shores of Lake Michigan popularly called the great “Beef Trust.” Nothing can exceed the skill and determination with which the author has marshalled his arguments. He is one of those debaters who stand no nonsense from their facts. He finds a place for each—even for the most contrary—in ingenious sequences which steadily approach his goal. All conditions of life—social, moral, political, economic, commercial, climatic, bacteriological are assembled, drilled into order, arranged under their proper standards, and led by converging roads to the assault. No undisciplined statement is allowed to weaken the stability of their line. One purpose and one purpose alone animates the mind of the commander, and inspires his army down to the humblest item which marches silently in the ranks—to make the great Beef Trust stink in the nostrils of the world, and so to contaminate the system upon which it has grown to strength. Here in the compass of a few hundred pages has been collected all that can be said against the canning industry, all that will damage it before its servants and expose it to its customers.

The “packers” are brought to the bar. The goods they sell, the materials they use, the city they dwell in, the wages they pay—every circumstance, great and small, of their business, together with its consequences, direct or remote, are subjected to a pitiless and malevolent scrutiny.

The worst has been told, and only the worst; it has been told in the most effective way; and the reader is confronted—nay, overwhelmed—by concatenations of filthy, tragic, detestable details, which reduce him, however combative or incredulous, to a kind of horror-struck docility.

Let me say at once that people have no right to hold their noses and shut their eyes. If these things are true, all honour to him who has the power and skill to fasten world-wide attention upon them. If they be only half true, a great public service has been rendered. If only one-tenth part be true, there would still, I fancy, be some debt owing by society to Mr. Upton Sinclair. And there is, unhappily, good reason to believe—scarcely, indeed, any reason to doubt—that a very considerable body of undeniable and easily ascertainable truth sustains the charges that are made. Mr. Upton Sinclair has done for the “packers” what Mr. Henry Lloyd did some years ago in “Wealth against Commonwealth” for the Standard Oil Trust. The mood and the motive of both books are the same; but in one respect Mr. Sinclair's method has a great advantage over his forerunner. “Wealth against Commonwealth” was a laborious compilation. The Jungle is a human tragedy.

The long middle sections of Churchill's review—the last two-thirds of the installment that ran in the first number of the P.T.O. and the first two-thirds of the continuation that appeared in the second—are consumed by a protracted plot summary. As if to compel those who would “hold their noses and shut their eyes” rather than confront the social reality and “human tragedy” of the Chicago slaughterhouses that he finds so admirably described by Sinclair, Churchill interlards his rehearsal of the plot with five lengthy excerpts from the novel. He closes by reflecting upon the rallying call for socialist reform with which Sinclair concludes The Jungle and considering its implications for British and American politics in the new century. For the first time his tone turns critical:

The reader will not, I think, be satisfied with this conclusion. After all that has happened, after all that has been suffered, he will look for some more complete consolation. Not so Mr. Upton Sinclair. This shrewd delineator of character, this painstaking and careful exponent of detail, appears sincerely unconscious of our disappointment. Consolation?—have we not the Socialist orator? Regeneration?—is not Jurgis fully instructed? Salvation?—who can doubt the earnestness of his convictions? What more can anyone require? Let us rejoice that through all this filth and agony one heart at least has been saved from error. There is one man more in Chicago who may be trusted to vote straight for the Socialist ticket. Hurrah!

In writing thus I do not mean to carp at the really excellent and valuable piece of work which this terrible book contains. It pierces the thickest skull and the most leathery heart. It forces people who never think about the foundations of society to pause and wonder. It enables those who sometimes think to understand. The justification of that vast and intricate fabric of Factory Law, of Health Acts, of Workmen's Compensation, upon which Parliament is swiftly and laboriously building year by year and month by month, is made plain, so that a child may see it, so that a fool may see it, so that a knave may see it. But I must frankly say that if the conditions of society in Chicago are such as Mr. Upton Sinclair depicts, no mere economic revolution would in itself suffice to purify and ennoble. A National or Municipal Beef Trust, with the United States Treasury at its back, might indeed give more regular employment at higher wages to its servants, and might sell cleaner food to its customers—at a price. But if evil systems corrupt good men, it is no less true that base men will dishonour any system, and while no bond of duty more exacting than that of material recompense regulates the relations of man and man, while no motion more lofty than that of self-interest animates the exertions of every class, and no hope beyond the limits of this fleeting world lights the struggles of humanity, the most admirable systems will merely succeed in transferring, under different forms and pretexts, the burden of toil, misery, and injustice from one set of human shoulders to another.

It is possible that this remarkable book may come to be considered a factor in far-reaching events. The indignation of millions of Americans has been aroused. That is a fire which has more than once burnt with a consuming flame. There are in the Great Republic in plentiful abundance all the moral forces necessary to such a purging process. The issue between Capital and Labour is far more cleanly cut to-day in the United States than in other communities or in any other age. It may be that in the next few years we shall be furnished with Transatlantic answers to many of the outstanding questions of economics and sociology upon whose verge British political parties stand in perplexity and hesitation. And that is, after all, an additional reason why English readers should not shrink from the malodorous recesses of Mr. Upton Sinclair's Jungle.

Churchill's recapitulation of Sinclair's plot and quotation of passages from the novel appear to have distressed some, who felt Chicago had been, if not grievously maligned, at least mischaracterized for English readers. An editorial note to the third issue of the P.T.O. acknowledges the fear that “Mr. Winston Churchill's brilliant articles and the ruthless exposure of Mr. Upton Sinclair's novel is [sic] apt to make us forget that Chicago is not all Packingtown, but a great city of as strange and startling contrasts as any in the world.” There follows a four-paragraph “vivid appreciation of Chicago written by a loyal Chicagoan” that celebrates the city's history, physical beauties and cultural wealth.⁷

Notes

1. The concise history of Christine Scriabine, “The Writing of The Jungle,” Chicago History, 10 (Spring 1981), 27-37, must now be supplemented by Michael Brewster Folsom, “Upton Sinclair's Escape from The Jungle: The Narrative Strategy and Suppressed Conclusion of America's First Proletarian Novel,” Prospects, 4 (1979), 237-66; and Gene DeGruson's introduction to The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair's “The Jungle” (Memphis and Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1988), pp. xiii-xxxi.

2. P.T.O., June 16, 1906, p. 1. Citations to this review are often mistaken. So, in his preface to the novel's 1965 edition, Sinclair himself identifies the journal as T.P.'s Weekly (The Jungle [New York: Limited Editions Club, 1965], p. xxiii). Ronald Gottesman misidentifies the journal's title as T.P.O. in his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Jungle (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), p. xxiii.

3. P.T.O., June 16, 1906, p. 2.

4. “Foreword” to The Jungle (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1965), p. ix. See also Sinclair, My Lifetime in Letters (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1960), p. 21.

5. A full-page advertisement for the London Dispatch printed at page 67 of the second of these issues announces that publication rights to The Jungle, the “amazing novel which has startled the world,” have been purchased by that weekly.

6. P.T.O., June 16, 1906, pp. 25-26; and June 26, 1906, pp. 65-66. Except for occasional changes of accidentals and the accommodation of the original to the conventions of English spelling, Churchill is generally faithful to Sinclair's text. However, in the first of his block quotations from the novel, he silently elides a four-sentence passage from page 47 of both 1906 editions with six concluding sentences from pages 67-68 of both.

7. P.T.O., June 30, 1906, p. 94.