Welcome to the Jungle

Rigorous definitions of working-class literature are no doubt available for those who seek them. Yet, that demographic is unlikely to include people originally from the working class or its shrinking neighbor, the lower middle class. Even those employed in academia may well have other research interests—if they can find time to pursue them while teaching, say, four or five adjunct classes at two or more post-secondary institutions.

Less rigorously, for most readers working-class literature should fulfill at least one of the following conditions: i) address working-class concerns, ii) be written by a person of working-class origins or iii) take a working-class perspective.

This is far easier said than done.

That difficulty emerges even in the work of a formidable figure like Upton Sinclair. For all the good wrought by The Jungle (1906)—too widely discussed elsewhere to consider here—his voice does not carry far into the next century.

In King Coal (1917), the contemporary reader is required to suspend more than the usual share of disbelief in following protagonist Hal Warner. The son of a mining magnate himself, Hal finds work in another company’s mines under the name of Joe Smith and lives in its company town between years of college, seeing how theories of political economy play out in practice. On his summer vacation, he becomes a de facto labor leader, manages to overcome the suspicions of miners and their families toward a well-bred outsider and lead men more than twice his age while enduring an implausible minimum of hazing and ball busting.

Nonetheless, his condescension virtually drips in viewing the town’s immigrant shanty-dwellers:

Thus, as always, when one understood the lives of men, one came to pity instead of despising. Here was a subterranean race of creatures, subterranean, gnomes, pent up by society for purposes of its own…Hal reflected upon this, and subdued his Anglo-Saxon pride, finding forgiveness for what was repulsive in these people—their barbarous jabbering speech, their vermin-ridden homes, their bare-bottomed babies.

Sinclair fails to comprehend those he would speak for. Few in the working class welcome pity, and fewer still would seek “forgiveness” for their poverty, let alone their languages and cultures.

Sinclair likewise draws his villains with as much subtlety as the top-hatted oligarchs of political cartoons. Of Judge Denton, magistrate of the nearest non-company town and partner in its leading law firm, Hal observes:

Here was another prosperous and well-fed appearing gentleman, with a rubicund visage shining over the top of his black silk robe… What he thought of, in connection with the Judge’s appearance, was that there was a living to be made sitting on the bench, while one’s partner appeared before the bench as coal-company counsel!

In his interior monologue, the “young miner” employs the diction of Henry James’s drawing rooms rather than a place where men grow up and, if they survive, quickly grow old working with their hands.

Although the world of King Coal is run by some men on the backs of others, women appear as well. Women unencumbered by agency, complexity or pronounced sexuality. Aside from dutiful wives and mothers in the background, only two women feature prominently, both making claims on Warner’s nearly neuter affections. We first meet Mary Burke, an “Irish lass” and “wild rose” who maintains a home in spite of her widowed father’s alcoholism. Under Hal’s tutelage, she emerges as a pro-union orator, but, with a second X chromosome, she can do only so much. Following a mine collapse that ultimately mobilizes the town, “Hal realized what a strain this terrible affair had been upon Mary. It had been bad enough to him—but he was a man, and more able to contemplate sights of horror …He looked at her, huddled in her chair, wiping away her tears with the hem of her blue calico. She seemed unspeakably pathetic—like a child that has been hurt.”

There is also the “girl at home, waiting for him,” Jessie...