The Word
The word is jungle. The book is called The Jungle. So how many times does it show up in the story?
Once. One time in thirty-one chapters, and I will show you where. This is a full summary of Upton Sinclair’s novel, so it spoils everything, the ending included.
Since the title hides, I followed something the book never stops naming: money. Every bill this family pays, owes or loses. You get the whole plot as a ledger, with counts from the text.
Which Edition
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred and forty. Its title page reads The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, nineteen oh six, and it is dedicated to the workingmen of America. By my count the thirty-one chapters run about one hundred and fifty-two thousand words. That is long, so I’ll keep this tight.
Outside facts come at the end, and I label them reported, as of November twenty twenty-six.
The Feast
Chapter one is a wedding feast, called a veselija, in the back room of a saloon in the part of Chicago known as back of the yards. Ona Lukoszaite, not quite sixteen, has just married Jurgis Rudkus, a giant who can carry a quarter of beef into a rail car without a stagger.
The feast is bill number one. Fifteen dollars for the hall. Twenty-two dollars and a quarter for the ducks. Twelve dollars for the musicians. Five dollars at the church. At three in the morning the dancing is still going, because everyone has to be at work at seven, and Ona has asked for a day off and been refused.
Chapters two to six go back in time. A party of twelve left Lithuania for America, five adults, six children, and Ona. Jurgis was hired at Brown’s after standing at the gate for half an hour, and he is proud of it.
The House
Now the second bill. Jurgis sees a bright advertisement for a house. Fifteen hundred dollars, three hundred down, twelve dollars a month. The family pools everything, and Teta Elzbieta pays the agent after a lawyer tells them the paper is regular.
Then a neighbor reads the deed and finds interest at seven percent. That means seven more dollars a month on top of the twelve. The agent says he thought they understood.
Next, a third bill. Old Antanas, Jurgis’s father, is approached in the pickle rooms by a man who will get him a job if he pays a third of his wages. He takes it. The wedding feast, in the end, leaves the family over a hundred dollars in debt.
The Grind
Winter is the fourth bill, and the family pays it in people. Old Antanas works in a cold cellar where chemicals eat through his boots and sores open on his feet. He coughs blood and dies, and Jurgis spends a whole Sunday bargaining so the funeral will not bankrupt them.
Jurgis joins the union. He learns English at night school. Then he sprains his ankle and lies in bed for three weeks. The boss has kept his place, but only for a day, and soon he is out of work.
Little Kristoforas dies too, and Marija gives ten dollars for his mass. Brother Jonas simply disappears one Saturday night. Jurgis finally gets a job in the fertilizer works, the lowest place in the yards.
Ona
The fifth bill is the one that breaks the book. Ona starts coming home in fits of weeping, and Jurgis cannot get an answer. At last she tells him. Connor, the boss of the loading gang, threatened to get the whole family fired, and forced her. She went to a house he chose, in the evenings.
Jurgis finds Connor and beats him, and the police drag him off. The charge is assault and battery. The sentence is thirty days and costs.
The Fall
In jail he meets Jack Duane, a cheerful, well-educated thief, who gives him an address. Jurgis serves his time, plus three extra days because he cannot pay a dollar and a half in court costs.
When he gets out, the house is gone. The family could not pay and were turned out into the snow, and the house was repainted and sold again. They are back at Aniele’s boardinghouse.
Ona is in labor in the attic. Jurgis runs for a midwife with one dollar and a quarter. Madame Haupt asks for ten, comes down to five, then comes anyway. The baby is born dead. Ona dies.
The Road
Jurgis spends the family’s last three dollars on whisky. He gets a job at a harvester factory, and on his ninth day the department is closed with no warning. Then his little son Antanas drowns in the mud of the street, which is when Jurgis leaves.
Here is the only time the word shows up. Chapter twenty-two, on the road, in a saloon, the beast in him screams as it has in the Jungle from the dawn of time. One mention, and it is about drink and appetite, not the yards.
He tramps the country all summer, returns in the fall, and begs. One freezing night a drunk young man named Freddie Jones hands him a hundred-dollar bill, and a butler kicks Jurgis down the front steps.
The Machine
Jurgis finds Jack Duane again, and the two rob people. His share of one job is fifty-five dollars. Then a night watchman named Harper offers him a salary if he will come back to Packingtown, do as he is told, and keep quiet. The man to serve is Mike Scully, the Democratic boss of the stockyards.
Jurgis helps Scully’s candidate win an election. Months later comes a great beef strike, and Scully tells him to stay at work as a scab. Jurgis saves nearly three hundred dollars.
Then, one night, drunk, he runs into Connor again and beats him. This time Scully turns him loose. All that is left of his bank account is a dollar and fourteen cents.
The Hall
Jurgis goes looking for Marija and finds her in a house, working to feed Elzbieta and the children. Stanislovas is dead, killed by rats. Jurgis wants to go home, but he is ashamed.
Then he wanders into a hall, falls asleep, and a woman whispers that if he tries to listen, comrade, he might be interested. He listens, for the first time. It is a Socialist speech, and he walks out a changed man. In the last chapters, he takes a hotel job from a Socialist owner, meets Ostrinski, and finally has an answer.
Counting
Now my counts, chapter text only. Jurgis is named one thousand, one hundred and seventeen times. The words Socialist, Socialists and Socialism, together, show up sixty-eight times. Sixty-three of them are in the last three chapters, which are about eleven percent of the book.
Until chapter twenty-nine, they barely appear. The ending turns the whole novel into an argument.
What It Did
Outside facts, all reported as of November twenty twenty-six. The Jungle ran in the newspaper Appeal to Reason in nineteen oh five, and Doubleday published it as a book in nineteen oh six. Reportedly, Theodore Roosevelt signed both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act on June thirtieth, nineteen oh six. Reports tie the book to those laws.
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