Tenement Houses In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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Tenement houses by no means were safe or clean places to live. Tenement houses were gross and extremely flimsy. “It was by no means unusual for two men to own the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Very frequently a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double shifts of men”(Sinclair 21). This quote shows some of the lengths immigrants had to go through on a daily basis just to sleep after their daily work. Things in America were so much more expensive, sharing beds was one of the ways immigrants had to sacrifice to make ends meet in their finances. I’ve heard people complaining about how expensive things were now a days but I never realized how truthfully hard someone's finances could be that they would share a bed with someone they possibly didn't even know to save money before I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.”Immigrants had to live in damp smelly cellars or attics, or up to six or 10 people, men, women and children packed into crowded single rooms where ‘filth for so many years reigned undisturbed and pestilence wiping out hundreds of lives annually.’ The tenement houses in the lower part of Manhattan and …show more content…
This shows how terrible the living conditions were for immigrants when they moved to America. This is what they had to live with because it was all they could afford with their low paying jobs. I thought living with five siblings was hard, but clearly not as hard as it would have been if we had moved here from a different country. “In many tenements, only the rooms on the street got any light, and the interior rooms had no ventilation (unless air shafts were built directly into the room). Later, speculators

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Capitalism was necessary to spark socialism. Capitalism was the catalyst for the incline in industry and business. Socialism grew because of capitalism. Upton 19th Century Industrialization 4. Sinclair's The Jungle shows the evil of capitalism. The main point of the novel is to show a particular failure of capitalism, which is, in Sinclair's view, inhuman, destructive, unjust, brutal, and violent. The slow destruction of Jurgis's (the main character) immigrant family at the hands of a cruel…

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