Comparing Upton Sinclair's The Jungle And The Gilded Age

Upton Sinclair's’ book the Jungle, is based over the Gilded Age in history. In the Gilded Age things did not appear as it seemed. For example the meat packing industry was very disgusting and the bosses hid those types of things from the public. In the story Sinclair writes about a family that are immigrants who are trying to survive in the inner parts of Chicago. The family gets cheated out of everything and nothing rarely ever goes their way. The first struggle the family had had started before they made it to America. The family had asked people for directions and people would take their money in order for them to get directions. When the family gets to America the first thing they need to do is get a job to support the main character, Jurgis’s, family. Jurgis was recently married to Ona when they got to America. The family …show more content…
The people of Packingtown lived by “survival of the fittest” if you could not fend for yourself you were not going to live for long. People could not help themselves by stealing and cheating others out of things just to get what they wanted so that they could survive. This was the way people rationalized things. Sinclair wrote about Darwinism by fitting it into how people had lived in the Gilded Age. Darwinism is a theory written by Charles Darwin, his theory was how animals or just beings survived by natural selection and it goes the same way for humans. If they cannot make it on their own they will get picked off and will not survive but some will adapt and in the book the ones that adapt are the ones that cheat to get their way and it might be wrong but they are the ones that survive. Sometimes the people in Packingtown had nothing to do with the family having such bad luck but once things seemed to go right things plummeted to wrong so quickly the family was never prepared to undergo some of the things they went