Homework answers / question archive / Research Paper Assignment (25% of Course Grade) You will write an argumentative essay that identifies/uncovers a significant undercurrent in one or both of the texts we read for this class

Research Paper Assignment (25% of Course Grade) You will write an argumentative essay that identifies/uncovers a significant undercurrent in one or both of the texts we read for this class

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Research Paper Assignment (25% of Course Grade) You will write an argumentative essay that identifies/uncovers a significant undercurrent in one or both of the texts we read for this class. What you should find is an “undercurrent” because—while it can be observed (it recurs) in several works—it is not so obvious (it is under the surface). This could be a pattern in terms of theme, characterization, narrative technique, strategy . . . etc. Also, it is “significant” because it teaches us something about the text(s) or the Victorian world/worldview. A good argument is based on sound logic/reasoning and reliable evidence. Your paper needs to have an effective title and a one-paragraph introduction that clearly indicates your thesis. Your paper should include a minimum of 7 body paragraphs (not counting introduction and conclusion) developed using paraphrases, summaries, and direct quotes from primary and secondary sources. The one-paragraph conclusion can do many things, like put a further spin on the argument, suggest further research...etc. Quoted material should never exceed 30 percent of your paper and should follow MLA-style guidelines. Your secondary sources must include at least two book chapters, three scholarly articles, and one “alternative” source. There must be a total of at least seven sources. The paper must follow MLA style and will be at least 1800 words (not including heading, title, and works cited list) and no more than 3000, using 1” margins, and 12 point Times New Roman Font. Your paper will have a Works Cited list (in MLA format) at the end. Due Date: 10 June 2021 Research Paper Rubric MLA formatting (No Cover Page/No Bold Font/Times New Roman/Correct Heading Format/Correct Margins/Double Spaced/Centered Title /5 Works Cited Format /5 In-Text Citation (Formatting/Sophisticated Integration of Quotations—Mostly short but effective quotes /5 Academic Style (Formal; Not Redundant or Wordy; Not Awkward; Thoughtful Word Choice) /10 Grammar: /10 Title (Interesting/Informative) Introduction (One Paragraph/Interesting/Appropriate for Content of Paper/Introduces Argument Effectively) /5 /5 Thesis Statement (Last Sentence in Introduction/One Sentence/ Argumentative/Focused/Descriptive, Not Prescriptive) /5 Background/History/Context Body Paragraphs (Minimum of One Paragraph/Effective/Supported by Evidence from Sources/Define key terms subtly) /5 Counter-Argument Body Paragraphs (Minimum of One Paragraph/Effective/Supported by Evidence from Sources/Introduce Counter-Argument subtly) /5 Main Points Body Paragraphs (Minimum of Four Paragraphs/Each Main Point Supported by Evidence from Sources/Introduce Main Points Subtly) /20 Conclusion (One Paragraph/Effective/Appropriate for Content of Paper/Interesting) /5 Organization and Coherence (Body paragraphs use effective topic sentences/follow a clear and logical organizational pattern) /15 Number of Sources Cited and Word Count: you will lose 10 points for every source under the required number of sources; you will lose 10 points for every missing type under the required number of four types; you will lose 10 points for every 1800 words under the minimum word count (1800 words) ?????? ?????’ ? ???????? JUDE THE OBSCURE T????? H???? was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on ? June ????; his father was a builder in a small way of business, and he was educated locally and in Dorchester before being articled to an architect. After sixteen years in that profession and the publication of his earliest novel Desperate Remedies (????), he determined to make his career in literature; not, however, before his work as an architect had led to his meeting, at St Juliot in Cornwall, Emma Gi?ord, who became his ?rst wife in ????. In the ????s Hardy had written a substantial amount of unpublished verse, but during the next twenty years almost all his creative e?ort went into novels and short stories. Jude the Obscure, the last written of his novels, came out in ????, closing a sequence of ?ction that includes Far from the Madding Crowd (????), The Return of the Native (????), Two on a Tower (????), The Mayor of Casterbridge (????), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (????). Hardy maintained in later life that only in poetry could he truly express his ideas; and the more than nine hundred poems in his collected verse (almost all published after ????) possess great individuality and power. In ???? Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit; in ???? Emma died and two years later he married Florence Dugdale. Thomas Hardy died in January ????; the work he left behind––the novels, the poetry, and the epic drama The Dynasts––forms one of the supreme achievements in English imaginative literature. P??????? I????? is a Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She has written the de?nitive analysis of how Jude the Obscure evolved during composition, as well as several other articles and chapters on Hardy. ?????? ?????’? ???????? For over ??? years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over ??? titles––from the ?,???-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary ?gures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its ?ne scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS THOMAS HARDY Jude the Obscure Edited with an Introduction and Notes by PATRICIA INGHAM 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ??? ??? Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Text, Introduction, Note on the Text, Explanatory Notes © Patricia Ingham 1985 Updated Select Bibliography © Patricia Ingham 2002 Chronology © Patricia Ingham 2002 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1985 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998 Revised edition 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928. Jude the obscure/Thomas Hardy; edited with an introduction and notes by Patricia Ingham. p. cm.––(Oxford world’s classics) Updated select bibliography. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–19–280261–5 1. Stonemasons––Fiction. 2. Illegitimate children––Fiction. 3. Unmarried couples––Fiction. 4. Children––Death––Fiction. 5. Wessex (England)––Fiction. 6. Adultery––Fiction. I. Ingham, Patricia. II. Title. III. Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press). PR4746.A2.T39 2002 823′.8––dc21 2001052326 ISBN 0–19–280261–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Ehrhardt by Re?neCatch Limited, Bungay, Su?olk Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire GENERAL CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi General Editor’s Preface vii Map of Hardy’s Wessex viii Introduction xi Note on the Text xxii Select Bibliography xxvi A Chronology of Thomas Hardy xxix JUDE THE OBSCURE Explanatory Notes ? ??? ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS F?? generous help of many kinds I should like to thank: the British Academy, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Penny Boumelha, Simon Gatrell, the late Juliet Grindle, Sheila Parsons, Richard Little Purdy, and Kathy Swift. ???????? ?????? GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE T?? ?rst concern in the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Hardy’s works has been with the texts. Individual editors have compared every version of the novel or stories that Hardy might have revised, and have noted variant readings in words, punctuation and styling in each of these substantive texts; they have thus been able to exclude much that their experience suggests that Hardy did not intend. In some cases this is the ?rst time that the novel has appeared in a critical edition purged of errors and oversights; where possible Hardy’s manuscript punctuation is used, rather than what his compositors thought he should have written. Some account of the editor’s discoveries will be found in the Note on the Text in each volume, while the most interesting revisions their work has revealed are included as an element of the Explanatory Notes. In some cases a Clarendon Press edition of the novel provides a wealth of further material for the reader interested in the way Hardy’s writing developed from manuscript to ?nal collected edition. I should like to thank Shirley Tinkler for her help in drawing the maps that accompany each volume. ????? ??????? This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION A???? the crude irony of the ?rst printed title, The Simpletons, its lurid replacement Hearts Insurgent, and the weakly descriptive suggestion The Recalcitrants, Jude the Obscure seems satisfactorily precise and untheatrical. But its asymmetry has the e?ect of overemphasizing the male protagonist; and the apparent protest at his fate has drawn attention to the parallels with Hardy’s own life. Editors have felt documentation of the autobiographical element was essential: Jude as Hardy, Sue as Mary Hardy–Emma Gi?ord– Florence Henniker all in one, and many details to be spelled out, even if they do not include a ?ctitious son by his cousin Tryphena to represent Little Father Time. This evidence is produced partly to refute Hardy’s typically devious denial that there is ‘a scrap of personal detail in it’.1 But Hardy’s obfuscations are often oblique truths and perhaps he was right to throw the critic o? that particular scent. In relation to the novel such information is trivial; it tells the biographer nothing he does not know already and critically it is a distraction. It diverts attention from the profounder sense in which Jude relates to its own time by engaging with three major forces in late Victorian society. These are the middle-class stranglehold on access to the most prestigious university education and on its content; the awareness of women that the self-estimates and roles forced on them by a patriarchal society were not the only possible ones; and the unresolved tension evoked by an established Christianity which for many had lost rational justi?cation, but which was still socially and imaginatively powerful. Such a schema is crudely sociological and reductive, whereas the novel itself struggles to express essentially hostile attitudes to these forces, which reach the reader as the ‘series of seemings’ that Hardy refers to in his original Preface. Only the surface symmetry of the story matches the simplicity of the schematized outline: Jude’s hopeful and despairing visits to Christminster; Jude and Sue both unsuitably married, divorced, and captured in the same marriage trap 1 F. E. Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (London, ????), ???. xii Introduction again; the contrast of ‘?esh and spirit’ represented by Arabella and Sue, appealing to the two sides of Jude’s nature; Arabella’s child killing Sue’s children; Jude liberated by grief, Sue subjugated by it. This symmetrical and stylized design runs through the details of the work: in the double seduction by Arabella, the double reference to Samson, Sue praying to Venus and Apollo, then prostrate on the ?oor of the ‘ritual church’, St Silas, a black heap contrasting with the white heap she made when she leapt from Phillotson’s bedroom window. But the design is merely a grid superimposed with a specious neatness on a presentation of turbulent contradictory views of the three subjects. The epigraph to the whole novel, ‘The letter killeth’, would make a better title, its meaning refracted by each of the three themes. The incompleteness of the quotation is vital: in no part of the story does ‘the spirit’ give life. The account of failed academic hopes has, unlike the sexual story, often been read simplistically, particularly when taken as a re?ection of Hardy’s own university hopes thwarted by poverty and lack of in?uence. But the autobiography must have been unexpectedly selfcritical, since the narrator makes clear from the start the delusory nature of the boy’s quest. Visually it is uncertain whether at ?rst he really sees Christminster at all or merely the city ‘miraged in the peculiar atmosphere’, ‘hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith’. And at his last view before going there he is not sure of anything about the city except that it ‘had seemed to be visible’. He fosters this visual sham on his ?rst night in the city, when passing ‘objects out of harmony with its general expression’ he allows his eyes to ‘slip over them as if he did not see them’. He imagines alleys ‘apparently never trodden now by the foot of man’ whose ‘very existence seemed to be forgotten’. The accounts he has of the place come from unreliable and vague witnesses: the carter recounting a report, the witch-like old woman. Although as a child he recognizes (or thinks he does) a ‘city of light’ where ‘the tree of knowledge grows’, and which is a ‘ship manned by scholarship and religion’, the object of Jude’s adult ambition is oddly ambiguous. The learning which he so painfully acquired and proudly lists until brought back to earth by a slap from a pig’s penis is already at this stage inextricable for him from religion or scholarship as a profession, with salary attached. In the early stages the narrator speaks of him as a ‘prospective D.D., Professor, Introduction xiii Bishop, or what not’, and fellowships were the entrance to both scholarly and ecclesiastical preferment.2 For Jude to become an undergraduate and then a graduate is to appropriate middle-class culture and status in one, a fact he is startlingly aware of. This is why when he meets Arabella he is exultantly listing his achievements in Classics and Mathemetics, those requirements for access to the ‘liberal education’ which Oxford defended vehemently for most of the nineteenth century as superior to and subsuming vocational subjects.3 They open the professional gates to Jude, or so he thinks: ‘ “These things are only a beginning . . . I’ll be D.D. before I have done! . . .” And then he continued to dream, and thought that he might become even a bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise, Christian life. And what an example he would set! If his income were £???? a year, he would give away £???? in one form and another, and live sumptuously (for him) on the remainder.’ Rejected by the colleges, he passes on to self-delusion, as the narrator makes clear, when he talks to the curate, Highbridge, about his failure, ‘dwelling with an unconscious bias less on the intellectual and ambitious side of his dream, and more upon the theological’: ‘ “I don’t regret the collapse of my university hopes one jot . . . I don’t care for social success any more . . . I bitterly regret the church, and the loss of my chance of being her ordained minister.” ’ (My italics.) Rather disconcertingly for the reader, the narrator, whose sympathy with Jude has been acute so far, now berates him for ‘mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice’ and rebukes him for that social unrest, that desire for upward mobility, which from the ????s had been an explicit reason for Oxford in particular holding back the spread of adult education to the working class in order to protect ‘the over-crowded professions’. The narrator’s volte-face sets the future pattern. He may condemn Jude sometimes but elsewhere, for instance in Jude’s speech to the crowd at Christminster, he will support his attempt to ‘reshape’ his course and rise into another class. The very title of the novel (in its ?nal form) is a protest not at Jude’s exclusion from the university nor at his thwarted scholarship but at his social failure. The odd emphasis thrown on the adjective by the archaic phrasing suggests that, for some self-evident reason, he ought not to have remained in the ‘obscurity’ of the working class. 2 3 A. J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don (Oxford, ????), ???–?. S. Marriott, A Backstairs to a Degree (Leeds, ????), ???. xiv Introduction Not only this, but Sue continues to assert rather melodramatically that Jude is one of the very men with a passion for learning that ‘Christminster was intended for . . . But you were elbowed o? the pavements by millionaires’ sons.’ Long after his academic e?orts have become nominal, both of them cling to this idea. He even still hopes for acceptance before they return to the city for the last time: ‘I love the place––although I know how it hates all men like me––the socalled Self-taught,––how it scorns our laboured acquisitions . . . Perhaps it will soon wake up, and be generous . . .’. So Jude is seen equally forcefully as being and as not being the pure seeker after learning. Despite his delusions about Christminster, both Jude and the narrator are seized of the desirability of the learning that the university o?ers, and even Sue speaks of some quali?ed ‘respect’ for the place ‘on the intellectual side’. What Christminster o?ers manifests itself in the web of allusion and quotation that enmeshes the novel: in the epigraphs, in the Christminster voices, and everywhere in the text. Comments on this material that spell out references have overlooked its overriding importance as a cruel and varying witness to its own alienation from the lives with which it is interwoven. The very epigraphs relating to Sue and Jude, those bland emblems (at ?rst reading) of the action in each section, dissolve before the reader’s eyes into something di?erent. Jude’s dealings with Arabella at Marygreen seem aptly summarized by the quotation from Esdras: ‘Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women . . .’. But the point of the original context of the passage is that, though this may be true, truth is stronger than wine, the king, or women––a passionate assertion forlornly unrelated to the story of Jude’s life. The two quotations introducing the Christminster section seem to capture the emergent optimism of Jude now embarking on his academic course––‘Save his own soul he hath no star’––and the joy of his incipient love for Sue––‘Nearness led to awareness . . . love grew with time’. Both fragments are torn out of context: Swinburne’s eulogy on self-reliance is woefully inapt for Jude; and Ovid is beginning not a joyous love-a?air but the tragic story of the doomed lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe. Even more cruelly irrelevant are the snatches from Sappho and the Book of Esther. ‘There was no other girl, O bridegroom, like Introduction xv her!’ ?xes Jude’s growing delight in Sue at Melchester; but what Sappho in context was promising the bridegroom was that erotic joy, the gift of Aphrodite, that Sue, for all her formal worship of the goddess whose image she buys, painfully fails to deliver. Similarly, her ?nal collapse into abject religiosity seems epitomized by the sentence describing Esther: ‘And she humbled her body greatly, and all the places of her joy she ?lled with her torn hair’. But in the original account Esther’s penitence is part of a calculated plan which triumphantly achieves the salvation of the Jews from slaughter, while Sue’s brings nothing but su?ering and death. The epigraphs are mockeries of what they appear to be: not formal and precise summaries linking neatly to each section but statements in an ambiguous and hostile relationship to the text. Within the novel other allusions relate in the same oblique way. The most extended attempt to annex Christminster learning appears in the voices of the spectres haunting the city that Jude imagines on his ?rst night there. The emptiness of assumed appropriation is evidenced by the fact that many of them are merely indirectly described and remain lifelessly unevocative; those quoted are not named but periphrastically alluded to also. The reader as well as Jude is assumed to be an initiate who can supply the names: Peel as he makes a passionate plea for the repeal of the Corn Laws; Gibbon ironically wondering at the pagan indi?erence to Christian miracles; Arnold eulogizing Oxford; Newman de?ning faith; Addison lamenting mortality. The reader encounters, despite the coherence of individual passages, an incoherent totality: a boy’s anthology of purple passages, ‘learning’ perhaps in a literal sense, ‘touchstones’, a kaleidoscope. For the rest, as the traditional learning reaches the reader through Jude and the narrator it is even more fragmented, useless, and irrelevant to his dilemmas. Jude as a boy innocently misapplies allusions, which rebound ironically. He imagines in the distant glow of Christminster the form of Phillotson (originally Sue) like one of the three in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace; but the story’s hope of salvation by God is not ful?lled for either the schoolteacher or the two who join him in that furnace. Later the boy prays to Phoebus and Diana for the happiness and prosperity he is never to know in what was originally a children’s joyous festival prayer. He sees Christminster as a ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, to which he goes full of the hope he derives xvi Introduction from an optimistic phrase taken from Spinoza, whose pervading belief was in an indi?erent Providence. Later Jude deliberately misapplies quotations in a perverse way, wrenching them to appropriateness. Exulting in the prospect of Christminster, he claims to be her beloved son, using the words describing God’s manifestation at Christ’s baptism. For the biblical injunction to persist in patience unto seventy times seven, he substitutes his desire to persist in being tempted by Sue, and it is from her love that he refuses to be divided, in the words St Paul used for separation from God. As he grows disillusioned the perverseness becomes more conscious: exiled by society’s condemnation of their unmarried state, he twists St Paul’s words about ‘wronging no man’ and makes this the reason for their being persecuted; when Sue leaves his bed he deliberately invokes the rending of the veil of the temple at Christ’s death. What is irrelevant he will make apt by perverting it. What Jude only learns of life’s cruelty the narrator knows from the start; he is already aware of the ironic irrelevance of the literary text. The boy Jude’s hopeful radiance illustrates ‘the ?attering fancy that heaven lies about them in their infancy!’ Just before the shattering of Jude’s academic hopes, he spells out the ‘inexplicable’ Greek sounds which translated give St Paul’s passionate declaration of faith in a loving and sustaining God. When Jude, already married, rapturously watches Sue in the cathedral, the narrator quotes only the apparently taunting opening of the Psalm that is being sung, ‘Where withal shall a young man cleanse his way’, not its context of trusting faith. The trick is repeated when the organist of the chapel next to the children’s death-house is heard playing the Psalm ‘Truly God is loving unto Israel’. But it is not only the irrelevance and ironic futility of Christian belief which is the point; frequently secular allusions do no more in their fragmented form than encapsulate what Jude and the narrator already know––that pain, injustice, and disillusionment are commonplace. When Jude’s scheme for entry to Christminster bursts like an ‘iridescent soap-bubble’ his thought ‘was akin to Heine’s’: Above the youth’s inspired and ?ashing eyes I see the motley mocking fool’s-cap rise. When he abandons principles for Sue he sees himself rejecting Introduction xvii Browning’s ‘soldier-saints’. His views on the chains of marriage are expressed by the trite lines from Thomas Campbell about ‘fetter’d love’. There is a laboured and inexplicit comparison between the Fawley family and the houses of Atreus and Jeroboam. A quotation from the Agamemnon appropriate to the children’s death, ‘Things are as they are . . .’, is given the same embarrassingly super?cial and applied quality by Sue’s question ‘Who said that?’ Each of them, but particularly Jude, has grasped only strands from his reading. He once thought that in order to learn Greek and Latin he had only to master a code; the same weakness is evident in his control over what he has read. It has not become his own; its fullness can be withheld from him by others who will not pass on its secrets; for a tutor he has only marginal glosses. In the end he possesses only the letter, and ‘the letter killeth’ here too in a sense that seems not intended by the novel’s epigraph. Through the narrator Hardy presents Jude as the true scholar, but the text tells a di?erent and probably truer story of the ‘Self-taught’ among whom Jude consciously numbers himself. Hardy intended ‘the letter killeth’, to refer explicitly to marriage,4 in particular Sue’s return to legal marriage with Phillotson. Many unorthodox views on women and marriage had already been expressed in the New Woman ?ction: the nobility of upper-class women o?ering a free union in place of marriage to respectable suitors; the horrors of sexual relationships without love; the syphilitic consequences of the double standard; the appalling e?ects of girls’ ignorance of marriage. Hardy’s treatment stands to this as Hamlet to the revenge play. Sue and Jude’s relationship springs into complex life because they are both victims of contemporary oppression: Jude through class, Sue through sex. They have other a?nities but this goes deepest and is the reason why their claims to two-inoneness are not absurd, despite the strong hostility that threads through the relationship on both sides. Hardy denied the novel was an attack on marriage laws and was right to discard this super?cial reading; but his assertion in the ???? postscript that ‘the general drift’ in relation to such laws was that ‘the civil law should only be the enunciation of the law of nature’ is more problematic. It is at least a strange remark to make of a novel which begins with a painful demonstration of the cruelty and irrationality of that law as 4 W. R. Goetz, ‘The Felicity and Infelicity of Marriage in Jude the Obscure’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, ?? (????), ???–???. xviii Introduction demonstrated by the boy and the earthworms. Nor did Hardy ?nd the morality simpler when handling the natural law in relation to man and woman. The idea of a contrast between legalistic and natural marriage is partly expanded by the narrator in his comment on Arabella’s and Jude’s ?rst marriage vow ‘to believe, feel, and desire’ for the rest of their lives precisely as they had done for the preceding weeks: ‘What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore’. Sue, looking closer, sees her loveless marriage to Phillotson as part of ‘the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in’, because ‘for a man and woman to live on intimate terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any circumstances’. This is the marriage of ‘the letter’ which she and Jude, sickened by Arabella, reject. Yet, once freed by divorce, what they propose instead is not an Owenite sexual freedom where only passion justi?es the act, but a marriage-like monogamy. There is already a joint inconsistency here. The horror of being licensed to love and be loved on the premises is powerfully evoked for the reader, and yet the narrative implies the very promise that the couple and the narrator shudder at: that they will always think and feel precisely as they do now. Desire cannot be added to this narrational promise, because what is meant by a natural marriage is further complicated by Sue. Paradoxically, when breaking free from her husband she claims with Jude a right to a totally non-sexual bond and to a non-marital sexual relationship. Given women’s position at the time it is easy to see why both claims needed to be made; and in a lesser novel the claims would refer to di?erent men. Here the contradiction produces an individual dilemma which captures the complications of the woman’s position most forcibly.5 This is presumably why the text is ambivalent about whether Sue feels desire even for Jude. There are passages which encourage the reader to think that she does not. Locked into this most feminist of all Victorian novels is a strange fragment of the orthodoxy exalting female chastity or at least virginity: ‘ “I seduced you . . . You were a distinct type––a re?ned creature, intended by Nature to be left intact. But I couldn’t leave you alone!” ’ On the other hand, the ???? edition contains carefully inserted 5 P. Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women (Sussex, ????), ???. Introduction xix references to suggest warmth in Sue: they kiss ‘long and close’, she admits that she ‘didn’t dislike’ him to kiss her, tells him ‘I do love you’, and just before going to Phillotson’s bed admits to having ‘loved’ Jude ‘grossly’. Arabella, closing the novel, suggests that Sue never found peace except in Jude’s arms, but how reliable a witness is she? Like Lockwood at the end of Wuthering Heights, she is the last person to read relationships aright. The novel can be read as showing that Sue felt desire or as showing that she did not, since at the very end she says: ‘ “I wanted to let it stop there, and go on always as mere lovers . . . Women could: men can’t . . . we ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.” ’ On Jude’s side a further contradiction appears. Although he is a victim of legalistic marriage and speaks violently against it, he behaves ?nally in their version of ‘Nature’s own marriage’ as the law told a nineteenth-century husband he might do: he enforces his ‘conjugal rights’, not by force, but by blackmail. Having agreed to live celibately with Sue he uses Arabella’s return to force her into sexual relations: ‘If she were yours it would be di?erent!’ ‘Or if you were.’ ‘Very well then––if I must I must. Since you will have it so, I agree! I will be. Only I didn’t mean to.’ The slide into the orthodox view which makes male desire paramount passes unnoticed and by the narrator’s sleight-of-hand it is next morning and Jude is arranging to marry her. Such shifts characterize Hardy’s attempts to break free of the orthodoxies of the day, attempts backed by passionate feelings, cutting across rational arguments, and in which an apparent success is always followed by regression. The novel enacts the struggle with all its inconsistencies. The pains of a ‘natural marriage’ in a society that goes in for the other kind are felt; the pleasures are not so easily grasped. Like the fruits of learning they prove evasive. The joyless pain evoked by Sue and Jude’s relationship is not cancelled or even dented by Sue’s strained assertion at the Great Wessex Agricultural Show as they saunter around the ?owers, unable to evoke even a spark of pleasure in Little Father Time: ‘ “We have returned to a Greek joyousness, and have blinded ourselves to sickness and sorrow, and have forgotten what twenty-?ve centuries have taught the race since their time . . .” ’ xx Introduction Again, it is only Arabella who reads an enduring idyll into this scene. The joy is looked forward to and back on, but is never actually there. When Sue returns after the children’s deaths to ‘the letter’ of civil marriage which kills, what it kills remains unde?nable. By this time the rejection and oppression that both experience have taken on gradually a single distinct form. As Jude’s hostility to the forces of rejection increases it focuses not on Christminster but on the Church, which has overarched the novel from the time of his dreams of success as a clergyman: His . . . sudden antipathy to ecclesiastical work . . . which had risen in him when su?ering under a smarting sense of misconception remained . . . [and] would not allow him to seek a living out of those who would disapprove of his ways . . . hardly a shred of the beliefs with which he had ?rst gone up to Christminster now remaining with him. Christminster, that hothouse which grew clergymen like radishes, has rejected him; Christians have ostracized him and Sue; the Church has administered the marriage of the letter. It has gradually become the symbol of all that oppresses. Jude thinks that he is free of it after the children’s death; but it is precisely then that its imaginative power grips Sue, the instinctive worshipper whether of Venus or the Galilean. Her earlier vague sense that the world resembled ‘a stanza or melody composed in a dream’ was ‘now exchanged for a sense of Jude and herself ?eeing from a persecutor’, the God of the Old Testament––the ‘ancient wrath’. That bass accompaniment in the references to Job, in the Psalms in the cathedral, and at the deaths of the children, now becomes dominant. The narrator, like Jude, is terri?ed by the crippling power of the guilt that the ‘ritual church’ can induce in Sue, who ?nally stops her ears against Jude’s human voice and returns to Phillotson’s bed. Christianity in the form it takes in their lives is the killing letter. Hardy evidently meant this to be one of the novel’s contrasts which he interwove through the story between Greek pagan joy and the life-denying force of the pale Galilean. But by a ?nal and confounding contradiction there also is woven through the text the image of Christ as su?ering human being; Jude, Sue, even Phillotson, are seen as His incarnations. The pointless and extreme su?ering, which in Hardy’s world is the paradigm experience, is refracted through the many Christ images. When Phillotson’s pupils desert him as he is leaving Introduction xxi Marygreen, the narrator equates them with the cowardly disciples at Christ’s trial. Sue sees herself and Jude driven from Kennetbridge to Christminster as Jesus sent from one hostile judge, Caiaphas, to another, Pilate. The falseness of Jude’s sense that he is favoured like God’s ‘beloved son’ is hinted at by the narrator associating him with Calvary, by his own realization that Sue is able to ‘crucify’ him, and when she separates herself from him, by a cry for the rending of the veil of the temple that took place at the time of that other Cruci?xion. Finally, the text subverts itself: its attack on the Church draws power from acceptance of a central Christian image. The imaginative attraction of the creed is still felt, just as it was by Hardy himself. The three strands in the story are really one. The mental and physical struggles against oppression in all three aspects are the same in their nature and outcome: Jude’s infatuation for Christminster reappears long after he has broken free of it; Sue who prided herself on her rationality embraces irrational guilt and legalistic marriage; and the hatred of the Church shows as its other face a powerful sense of a?nity with its founder. Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictions the novel remains the most powerful indictment of the sexual and class oppression of its time. The pandemonium it evoked was appropriate. This focused on the sexual story, but beneath the charges that it was ‘the most indecent novel ever written’ there is a sense of deeper panic. And rightly: Hardy was struggling towards, and sometimes momentarily achieved, beliefs subversive of the whole of established society. He felt a deep desire to ‘break up the present pernicious conventions in respect of manners, customs, religion, illegitimacy, the stereotyped household’.6 Contemporary society recognized a revolutionary when it saw one. 6 R. L. Purdy and M. Millgate, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, iii. ???. NOTE ON THE TEXT Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last novel, ?rst appeared in mangled serial form in the European and American editions of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine from December ???? to November ????. Its ?rst printed title (presumably describing Sue as well as Jude) was The Simpletons, later changed to an earlier idea, Hearts Insurgent. In it Arabella does not seduce Jude, Jude and Sue never become lovers nor have children, and Jude does not spend a night with the returned Arabella. The publishers had insisted on a moral cleaning-up and Hardy evidently made changes himself, including some of the many minor ones required by contemporary prudery. For its ?rst appearance in volume form Hardy quickly prepared the text from the manuscript as part of the ?rst complete edition of his novels to be published by Osgood McIlvaine (the ‘Wessex Novels’). The Jude volume, published in ????, generally referred to as the ‘First Edition’, restored the omissions listed above and divided the narrative into six sections, each named for and set in a particular place and provided with an epigraph. This preparation, which took place in the summer of ???? after Hardy ?nished writing the novel in March, is generally assumed to have been as he described it: a simple process of deleting blue and green ‘serial alterations’ from the original black-ink manuscript, which already shows layers of alteration and a core in which Sue not Phillotson was the focus of Jude’s Christminster hopes.1 As usual with Hardy, the process of preparation for volume publication was not as he would have it seem. The manuscript (which lacks most of those pages which refer to ‘objectionable’ incidents) was not the copy for either of the ?rst two printed texts. For each, another copy was prepared, and the one for the volume edition was made with the serial text to hand. It incorporates and even increases various trivial bowdlerizings from the serial, so beginning a process which continued, surprisingly, up to Hardy’s last revised version–– thus perpetuating the bowdlerizing of details relating to sex and 1 See J. Paterson, ‘The Genesis of Jude the Obscure’, Studies in Philology ?? (????), ??–??; and P. Ingham, ‘The Evolution of Jude the Obscure’, RES ?? (????), ??–?? and ???–??. Note on the Text xxiii religion, even though they occur alongside major comments and incidents of an unparalleled explicitness in contemporary literature. Jude, for instance, no longer says that he doubts whether he is even a Christian, and a cutting reference when Sue remarries to God’s establishment of matrimony is omitted. Jude’s bitter diatribe on marriage to Mrs Edlin during her last visit is toned down. Neither the diatribe nor the pig’s-pizzle episode was ever restored to the explicitness of the manuscript. Despite this authorial timidity Hardy made many substantial changes while preparing copy for the First Edition from the manuscript. The narrative was reshaped by removing the long description of Shaston (suitably modi?ed) from before Sue’s ?rst marriage to Phillotson to a time after it, so that it began the Shaston section. There is a factual change in the increasing of Sue and Jude’s own children from one to two, before the violent deaths. Jude is made to reject the Church explicitly when he goes away with Sue, and to utter a long lamentation from Job on his death-bed. Sue is turned into a more complex, less spontaneous ?gure by several minor but powerful changes which write in the ‘elusiveness of her curious double nature’, and make her more ready to coquette or feign (see notes to p. ???). Even Phillotson is made more complicated: in the manuscript his liberalism about releasing Sue is beaten out of him by the social consequences; in the First Edition he keeps his views unchanged but conceals them and takes her back as a cynically prudential move. In addition, the ???? ‘First Edition’ was marred, like the serial, by the imposition of printing-house punctuation quite di?erent from the treatment in the manuscript, characteristic of Hardy, which is altogether more sparing and forceful.1 In proof Hardy accepted this new punctuation, which it would by then have been impossible to get rid of, tinkering with it only in minor ways. But, as always, in correcting and checking he could not resist revising, and added to the revises another spectre amongst those Jude imagines when he ?rst goes to Christminster: Gibbon quoting from his Decline and Fall. Again, when the German ‘Tauchnitz Edition’ appeared in ????, the non-authorial punctuation of the First Edition became more ?rmly established, since Tauchnitz used the Osgood McIlvaine text 1 See S. Gatrell, ‘Hardy, House-Style, and the Aesthetics of Punctuation’, The Novels of Thomas Hardy, ed. A. Smith (????), ???–??. xxiv Note on the Text (though not the actual printing plates). Further, the insidious trivial bowdlerizing was now a normal part of each new text and is seen particularly in the pig’s-pizzle scene. A few other corrections suggest that the alterations were Hardy’s own. When in ???? Macmillan took over as Hardy’s publishers they wished to stake their claim by a complete edition of his works. The bang with which his career as a novelist ended had made him a ?ne commercial proposition. However, in the ???? so-called Uniform Edition Macmillan still used the Osgood McIlvaine plates for printing, producing yet again what was basically the non-authorial punctuation of the ‘First Edition’. Again, Hardy made changes, many being bowdlerizings in the pig’s-pizzle throwing episode, as well as some thirty other instances chie?y involving early scenes with Arabella. It was not until ????, after an abortive attempt by Hardy to arrange an ‘edition de luxe’ of all his works with an American publisher, that Macmillan prepared a thoroughly revised ‘de?nitive’ version of all his work, the ‘Wessex Edition’. Using a copy of the Uniform Edition of Jude, Hardy revised onto it to make printer’s copy; he also revised and up-dated his preface. As with the earlier editions Hardy read proofs carefully. Again he accepted the now fossilized punctuation, but made alterations and revisions numbering more than two hundred. Some of them were stylistic, but many were part of the process of authorial rethinking which had been going on since Hardy began to write the manuscript. Several relate to Sue, and whereas the First Edition had diminished her simplicity and warmth, these complicate her further by adding suggestions of stronger feeling: she and Jude now kiss ‘long and close’; she admits to ‘not disliking’ his kissing her (earlier she had not disliked it ‘very much’); and she confesses to Jude ‘I do love you’ (see note to p. ???). Her motives become less, not more clear, and she becomes more ‘elusive’. Further, as the American publishers who had been interested in the de luxe edition ceased to be involved before its publication, Harpers now negotiated for the American rights of the Wessex Edition. For copyrighted novels, including Jude, they acquired the sheets from Macmillan. Hardy appears to have proof-read some of this socalled Autograph Edition. The Jude text shows about ?fty di?erences from the Wessex Edition, some, such as those reverting to an Note on the Text xxv earlier reading, clearly Hardy’s. The Autograph Edition therefore has some authority and use has been made of it. Even after this, the last revised edition before his death in ????, Hardy continued to make one or two emendations, though only minor ones, on his own volumes of the Wessex Edition. These were marked in to two of Hardy’s own copies of Jude (one in the Dorset County Museum, the other in the Adams collection). Typically he was still rewriting even thirty years after he began to create the novel. Again, these emendations have been made on the basis of these corrections. The present edition presents the text of the ???? volume with emendations both from the manuscript and from later editions, based on a knowledge of textual transmission, where error or authorial alteration can be inferred. It adopts, like the Clarendon editions of The Woodlanders and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the punctuation of the manuscript, with its sparing use of commas, precision with colons, and its avoidance of the ubiquitous exclamation marks that lend an over-emphatic rhetorical quality to much of the dialogue in the ???? edition. For missing pages the punctuation of the First Edition is accepted. The alterations to punctuation that Hardy made during the history of the text are not accepted, since they are alterations of the system as others left it, not as he originally made it. Variants cited in the Notes are selective. A primary aim is to make clear the di?erences in the manuscript written in ????–? and the ?nal revised version of ????––where these are of literary interest. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Biography The de?nitive work is M. Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ????). The sources for biography include Hardy’s own autobiography: M. Millgate (ed.), The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, ????); R. L. Purdy and M. Millgate (eds.), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ? vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ????–??); M. Millgate (ed.), Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ????)––fascinating insights into Hardy’s domestic life; James Gibson (ed.), Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan ????). Hardy on Fiction His contributions to symposiums are to be found in Harold Orel (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (London: Macmillan, ????), ???–??. Contemporary Reviews R. G. Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, ????)––a selection of reviews of all Hardy’s novels and some of his poetry. The reviews by Edmund Gosse and Havelock Ellis are noteworthy. Criticism Books Books containing relevant material or chapters on Jude the Obscure include: Boumelha, Penny, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Brighton: Harvester, ????). Dellamora, R., Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, ????), chapter ??. Gerson, M., Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Women, Body, Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ????). Goode, J., Thomas Hardy: The O?ensive Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, ????). Higonnet, M., Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, ????). Ingham, P., Thomas Hardy, A Feminist Reading (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester ????). Select Bibliography xxvii —— The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (London: Routledge, ????), chapter ?. Miller, J. Hillis, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ????). Millgate, M., Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: Bodley Head, ????). Morgan, R., Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, ????), chapter ?. Widdowson, P., Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London and New York: Routledge, ????). Articles There have been numerous articles on Jude the Obscure. The following include a variety of recent approaches relating to class, gender, philosophy and religion. Davis, W., ‘Happy Days in Jude the Obscure: Hardy and the Crawford– Dilke Divorce Case’, Thomas Hardy Journal, ??.? (????), ??–??. Dellamora, R., ‘Male Relations in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure’, Papers on Language and Literature, ??.? (????), ???–??. Farrell, J. P., ‘Crossroads to Community: Jude the Obscure and the Chronotope of Wessex’, in M. Macovski (ed.), Dialogue and Critical Discourse: Language, Culture, Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ????), ??–??. Freeman, J., ‘Highways and Corn?elds: Space and Time in the Narration of Jude the Obscure’, Colby Quarterly, ??.? (????), ???–??. Goetz, W. R., ‘The Felicity and Infelicity of Marriage in Jude the Obscure’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, ?? (????), ???–???. Goode, J., ‘Sue Bridehead and the New Woman’, in M. Jacobus (ed.), Women’s Writing and Writing about Women (London: Croom Helm, ????), ???–??. Ingham, P., ‘The Evolution of Jude the Obscure’, Review of English Studies, ?? ?? (????), ??–?? and ???–??. Kelly, M. A., ‘Schopenhauer’s In?uence on Hardy’s Jude the Obscure’, in E. von der Luft (ed.), Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of his Two Hundredth Birthday (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, ????), ???–??. —— ‘Individuation and Consummation in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: The Lure of the Void’, Victorian Newsletter, ?? (????), ??–?. Langland, E., ‘A Perspective of One’s Own: Thomas Hardy and the Elusive Sue Bridehead’, Studies in the Novel, ?? (????), ???–???. Law, J., ‘ “Sleeping Figures”, Hardy, History and the Gendered Body’, English Literary History, ??.? (????), ???–??. xxviii Select Bibliography McNees, E., ‘Reverse Typology in Jude the Obscure’, Christianity and Literature, ??.? (????), ??–??. Nemesvari, R., ‘Appropriating the Word: Jude the Obscure as Subversive Apocrypha’, Victorian Review, ??.? (????), ??–??. Pyle, F., ‘Demands of History: Narrative Crisis in Jude the Obscure’, New Literary History, ??.? (????), ???–??. Timko, M., ‘Edinburgh, Oxford, Christminster: Self and Society in Victorian England’, Victorian Institute Journal, ?? (????), ??–??. Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics Hardy, Thomas, Far From the Madding Crowd, ed. Suzanne B. Falck-Yi. —— An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories, ed. Pamela Dalziel. —— Life’s Little Ironies, ed. Alan Manford and Norman Page. —— The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Dale Kramer. —— A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Alan Manford. —— The Return of the Native, ed. Simon Gatrell. —— Selected Poetry, ed. Samuel Hynes. —— Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell. —— The Trumpet-Major, ed. Richard Nemesvari. —— Two on a Tower, ed. Suleiman M. Ahmad. —— Under the Greenwood Tree, ed. Simon Gatrell. —— The Well-Beloved, ed. Tom Hetherington. —— Wessex Tales, ed. Kathryn R. King. A CHRONOLOGY OF THOMAS HARDY Life ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? Historical and Cultural Background Telegraph comes into use. William IV dies and is succeeded by Victoria. Anti-Corn Law League set up. Chartist riots. ? June: Thomas Hardy born, Victoria marries the German prince, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, Albert. Penny postage instituted. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop eldest child of a builder, serialized Thomas Hardy, and Jemima Hand, who have been married Charles Darwin, The Voyage of HMS Beagle for less than six months. Younger siblings: Mary (b. ????), Henry (b. ????), Katherine (Kate) (b. ????). Underground labour banned for women and children. Robert Browning, Dramatic Lyrics Alfred Tennyson, Poems Dickens, A Christmas Carol John Ruskin, Modern Painters Factory Act limiting working hours for women and children. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (popularizing an evolutionary view) John Henry Newman joins the Roman Catholic Church. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil F. Engels, Condition of the Working Classes in England in ???? ‘Railway Mania’ year: ??? Railway Acts passed. Repeal of the Corn Laws which have protected farm prices. Irish potato famine (????–?) kills over a million people. Ten Hour Factory Act (limiting working hours). Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights. xxx Chronology Life ????–?? Schooling in Dorset. ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? Hardy watches the hanging of Martha Browne for the murder of her husband (thought to be remembered in the death of Tess Durbey?eld on the gallows). Historical and Cultural Background Chartist Petition to Parliament and end of Chartism. Year of revolutions in Europe. Public Health Act (inspired by Edwin Chadwick’s Report into the Sanitary Conditions of the Working Classes). Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded. Dickens, Dombey and Son Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto Public Libraries Act. Dickens, David Copper?eld Tennyson, In Memoriam The Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, supported by Prince Albert, a great success. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice Thackeray, Henry Esmond Vaccination against smallpox becomes compulsory. Dickens, Bleak House Charlotte Brontë, Villette Gaskell, Cranford Matthew Arnold, Poems Outbreak of the Crimean War: Britain and France defend European interests in the Middle East against Russia; Florence Nightingale goes out to Scutari in the Crimea. Dickens, Hard Times Gaskell, North and South Anthony Trollope, The Warden (?rst of the Barchester novels) Crimean War ends; Victoria Cross for bravery instituted. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (lengthy and melodramatic verse narrative of a woman writer’s life) Chronology xxxi Life Historical and Cultural Background ????–?? Articled to Dorchester architect John Hicks; later his assistant; late ????s, important friendship with Horace Moule (eight years older, middle-class, and Cambridge educated) who becomes his intellectual mentor and encourages his self-education in the classics. ???? Matrimonial Causes Act makes divorce possible without an Act of Parliament, but on unequal terms for men and women. Dickens, Little Dorrit Trollope, Barchester Towers Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary ???? Indian Mutiny crushed. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life ???? Darwin, The Origin of Species Samuel Smiles, Self-Help J. S. Mill, Liberty Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Eliot, Adam Bede Tennyson, Idylls of the King ???? Cobden Act extends free trade. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White ???? Death of Prince Albert: Victoria goes into seclusion. Outbreak of American Civil War. Dickens, Great Expectations Eliot, Silas Marner Francis Palgrave, Golden Treasury (much quoted by Hardy) Isabella Beeton, Book of Household Management (sells over ??,??? copies in one year) Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s ???? Employed as a draughtsman Secret (the best known of the lurid by London architect, Arthur sensational novels of the ????s) Bloom?eld. Self-education continues, including earlier English writers. ???? Work begins on ?rst London underground (steam) railway. Football Association founded as professional sport. The Metropolitan Line is developed. Thackeray dies. Eliot, Romola Mill, Utilitarianism in book form xxxii Chronology Life ???? ???? Historical and Cultural Background Albert Memorial is constructed. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (the ?rst of the political series, the Palliser novels) Founding by William Booth of what becomes the Salvation Army. End of American Civil War. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend ???? After the defeat of the Reform Bill to extend the vote: rioting in Hyde Park. Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, left un?nished at her death ???? Returns to Dorset as a jobbing Second Reform Act increases voters to two architect. He works for Hicks million; Mill tries to include women in the Bill but fails. Paris Exhibition. on church restoration. Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (last of the Barchester novels) Marx, Das Kapital ???? Completes his ?rst novel The Poor Man and the Lady but it is rejected for publication (see ????). ???? Works for the architect Crickmay in Weymouth, again on church restoration. Founding of the Trades Union Congress. Collins, The Moonstone Browning, The Ring and the Book ???? After many youthful infatuations thought to be referred to in early poems, he meets Emma Lavinia Gi?ord, his future wife, on a professional visit to St Juliot in north Cornwall. ???? Desperate Remedies published in volume form by Tinsley Brothers. Married Women’s Property Act gives wives the right to keep their earnings. Elementary Education Act enabling local authorities to set up schools. Dickens dies, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood un?nished. D. G. Rossetti, Poems Legalizing of trade unions. First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris. Religious tests abolished at Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham universities. Eliot, Middlemarch Darwin, The Descent of Man ???? Under the Greenwood Tree published in volume form by Tinsley Brothers. Suez Canal opened. Founding of Girton College. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy Mill, The Subjection of Women Chronology xxxiii Life ???? A Pair of Blue Eyes (based on his meeting with Emma) and previously serialized in Tinsleys’ Magazine. Horace Mould commits suicide in Cambridge. Historical and Cultural Background Mill, Autobiography Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (encouraging ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and an impetus towards the later Aesthetic Movement) ???? Far from the Madding Crowd (previously serialized in the Cornhill Magazine). Hardy marries Emma and sets up house in Surbiton, London. (They have no children, to Hardy’s regret, and she never gets on with his family.) ???? Emma and Hardy return to Swanage in Dorset. Factory Act. Artisans’ Dwellings Act (providing housing for the ‘respectable poor’ or ‘artisans’). E?cient system of compulsory vaccination of children against smallpox introduced. Trollope, The Way We Live Now (?erce satire on contemporary society and its greed) ???? The Hand of Ethelberta (previously serialized in the Cornhill Magazine) published in volume form. Disraeli creates Victoria Empress of India. Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone. Invention of the phonograph. Eliot, Daniel Deronda Henry James, Roderick Hudson ???? The Return of the Native (previously serialized in Belgravia) published in volume form. The Hardys move back to London (Tooting). Serialized version of part of the unpublished ?rst novel appears in Harper’s Weekly in New York as An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress (never included in his collected works). ???? London University grants degrees to women for the ?rst time. G. H. Lewes dies. Beginning of a long though intermittent economic depression in Britain, lasting into the ????s. William Morris’s lecture, The Art of the People, explaining ideas which led later to the Arts and Crafts Movement in the latter part of the century. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House James, Daisy Miller xxxiv Chronology Life ???? The Trumpet-Major (previously serialized in Good Words) published in volume form. Hardy is ill for many months. Historical and Cultural Background Gladstone becomes Prime Minister for the second time. George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert die. Education Act makes elementary education compulsory. Charles Parnell demands home rule for Ireland. George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn Tennyson, Ballads and Other Poems Trollope, The Duke’s Children (last of the Palliser novels) ???? A Laodicean (previously serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine) published in volume form. The Hardys return to Dorset, living at ?rst in Wimborne. Death of Carlyle. ‘Otto’ safety bicycle patented: Hardy and Emma become keen cyclists. By the ????s many have succumbed to ‘bicycle mania’. Ibsen, Ghosts (involving syphilis but later seen by Queen Victoria) James, Portrait of a Lady ???? Two on a Tower (previously serialized in the Atlantic Monthly) published in volume form. ????–?? ???? ???? Hardy becomes a Justice of the Peace and serves as a magistrate in Dorchester. ???? The Hardys move for the last time: to a house, Max Gate, outside Dorchester, designed by Hardy and built by his brother. ???? The Mayor of Casterbridge (previously serialized in The Graphic) published in volume form. ???? The Woodlanders (previously serialized in Macmillan’s Magazine) published in volume form. Hardy begins to visit London for ‘the Season’. Visit to Italy. ???? Wessex Tales. Visit to Paris. Parliament repeatedly vetoes votes for women. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (exposé of poverty) Third Reform Bill. Founding of the Fabian Society. Death of General Gordon at Khartoum. Criminal Law Amendment Act (raises age of consent to ??). Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. Irish Home Rule Act. Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Matthew Arnold dies. Chronology Life ???? ???? xxxv Historical and Cultural Background London dock strike. Robert Browning dies. William Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (exhaustive documentary account) starts publication G. B. Shaw, Fabian Essays on Socialism Ibsen, A Doll’s House staged in London Gissing, The Nether World Decline of the circulating libraries and the death of the three-volume novel. William Morris founds the Kelmscott Press. Housing of the Working Classes Act. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ibsen, Hedda Gabler ???? Tess of the d’Urbervilles (previously serialized in censored form in The Graphic) published in volume form. It simultaneously enhances his reputation as a novelist and causes a scandal because of its advanced views on sexual conduct. A Group of Noble Dames (tales) also published. ???? Hardy’s father, Thomas, dies. Serialized version of The Well-Beloved, entitled The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, published in the Illustrated London News. Hardy’s estrangement from Emma increases. Death of Alfred Tennyson. Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads ????–? Our Exploits at West Poley, a long tale for boys, published in an American periodical, The Household. Serial version of The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved––virtually a di?erent novel from the later book version. ???? Meets Florence Henniker, one of several society women with whom he had intense friendships. Collaborates with her on The Spectre of the Real (published ????). Keir Hardie sets up the Independent Labour Party. Wilde, A Woman of No Importance xxxvi Chronology Life ???? Life’s Little Ironies (tales). ???? Jude the Obscure appears in volume form: a savage attack on marriage which worsens relations with Emma. Serialized previously in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in bowdlerized form. It receives both eulogistic and vitriolic reviews. The latter are a factor in his ceasing to write novels. ???? ????–? First collected edition: the Wessex Novels (?? volumes). This includes the ?rst book edition of Jude the Obscure. ???? The Well-Beloved, a newly rewritten version of the ???? serial, added to the Wessex Novels as volume XVII. From now on he only publishes the poetry he has been writing since the ????s. ???? Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Hardy and Emma continue to live at Max Gate but are now estranged and ‘kept separate’. ????–???? ???? ???? Poems of the Past and the Present (post-dated ????). ???? Macmillan becomes his publisher. ???? Historical and Cultural Background Kipling, The Jungle Book Oscar Wilde jailed for homosexual o?ences; serves three years. The ?rst Bristol electric tramway. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest H. G. Wells, The Time-Machine Locomotive on the Highways Act (car speed maximum ?? m.p.h.). Death of William Morris. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Existing su?rage organizations unite as National Union of Women’s Su?rage Societies. Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion Germany begins the building of a large battle ?eet. Britain responds by doing the same. Wilde released from prison. Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol Boer War in South Africa over the Transvaal gold mines; Britain crushes the Boers. Labour Representation Committee set up to get Labour candidates into Parliament. Wilde and Ruskin die. Victoria dies and is succeeded by Edward VII. James, The Wings of the Dove First manned ?ight by Wright brothers in the USA. Motor Car Act raises speed limit to ?? m.p.h. James, The Ambassadors Chronology Life ???? Hardy’s mother Jemima, the single most important in?uence in his life, dies. Part ? of The Dynasts (epic drama in verse on Napoleon) published. ???? At about this time Hardy meets Florence Emily Dugdale, his future second wife, then aged ??. She is soon a friend of Hardy and Emma, and his part-time secretary. ???? Part ? of The Dynasts. ???? ???? Part ? of The Dynasts completes the work. ???? Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses. ???? Is awarded the Order of Merit, having previously refused a knighthood. Also receives the Freedom of Dorchester. ???? xxxvii Historical and Cultural Background Anglo-French Entente. James, The Golden Bowl Increased trade-union activity. E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread Thirty Labour MPs are elected in General Election. Anglo-Russian Entente. Act allowing marriage with deceased wife’s sister. First London cinema. Forster, The Longest Journey Non-contributory state pension is set up. Forster, A Room with a View Housing and Town Planning Act (to help provide working-class housing). Labour Exchanges Act (seeking employment previously di?cult). Edward VII dies and is succeeded by George V. National Insurance Act. D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock William Morris produces ?rst cheap ???? ?? November: Emma dies, Morris Oxford car. George V attends ?rst still estranged. Her death triggers the writing of Hardy’s Royal Command Variety Performance. ?nest love lyrics, Poems of ????–????, about their early time together in Cornwall which he now revisits. ????–?? Publication of a major collected edition of novels and verse by Hardy: the Wessex Edition (?? volumes). ???? A Changed Man and Other A su?ragette throws herself under the Tales. King’s horse at the Derby. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers xxxviii Chronology Life ???? ?? February: Hardy marries Florence Dugdale (who was hurt by the poems written about Emma after her death). Satires of Circumstance; The Dynasts: Prologue and Epilogue. ????–?? ???? Mary, Hardy’s sister dies. His distant relative, Frank George, is killed at Gallipoli. ???? Selected Poems. ???? Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses. ???? ???? Historical and Cultural Background Start of First World War. A million copies of books now available in free public libraries. James Joyce, Dubliners Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out Lawrence, The Rainbow Self-proclamation of an independent Irish Republic. T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations First World War ends. Vote extended to men over ?? and some women over ??. Those Irish who want independence set up their own parliament, the Dáil, and the Irish ‘troubles’ begin. British troops ruthlessly repress the rebels. Education Act raises the school-leaving age to ?? and extends education for some to ??. Russian Revolution helps stir up working-class militancy. First satisfactory contraceptive for women is devised. ????–?? Mellstock Edition of novels and verse (?? volumes). ???? Increased social awareness is indicated by extension of National Insurance against unemployment. Lawrence, Women in Love ???? Ireland splits into new republic and the North, which remains part of the United Kingdom. ???? Late Lyrics and Earlier with BBC is set up. Many Other Verses. Joyce, Ulysses Woolf, Jacob’s Room T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land ???? The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (drama). Florence Henniker dies. The Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII (later the Duke of Windsor), visits Max Gate. Chronology Life ???? Dramatized version of Tess performed at Dorchester. Hardy is infatuated with the local woman, Gertrude Bugler, who plays Tess. ???? Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Tri?es. ???? xxxix Historical and Cultural Background First Labour Government formed by Ramsay Macdonald. Forster, A Passage to India Woolf, Mrs Dalloway and The Common Reader (essays) May: General Strike, lasting ? days. James Ramsay Macdonald forms a coalition government which he leads until ???? but is expelled from the Labour Party who refuse to support it. ???? Invention of talking pictures. Woolf, To the Lighthouse Vote is extended to women over ??. ???? ?? January: Hardy dies. His Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover heart is buried in Emma’s grave at Stinsford, his ashes in Woolf, Orlando Westminster Abbey. Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres published posthumously. Hardy’s brother, Henry, dies. ????–?? Hardy’s autobiography is completed by his second wife and published on his instructions under her name. ???? Florence, Hardy’s second wife, dies. ???? Hardy’s last sibling, Kate, dies. This page intentionally left blank JUDE THE OBSCURE ‘The letter killeth’ This page intentionally left blank PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION T?? history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape has been much retarded by the necessities of periodical publication) is brie?y as follows. The scheme was jotted down in ????, from notes made in ???? and onwards, some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman* in the former year. The scenes were revisited in October ????; the narrative was written in outline in ???? and the spring of ????, and at full length, as it now appears, from August ???? onwards into the next year; the whole, with the exception of a few chapters, being in the hands of the publisher by the end of ????. It was begun as a serial story in Harper’s Magazine at the end of November ????, and was continued in monthly parts. But, as in the case of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the magazine version was for various reasons an abridged and modi?ed one, the present edition being the ?rst in which the whole appears as originally written. And in the di?culty of coming to an early decision in the matter of a title, the tale was issued under a provisional name, two such titles* having, in fact, been successively adopted. The present and ?nal title, deemed on the whole the best, was one of the earliest thought of. For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age; which attempts to deal una?ectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity; to tell, without a mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between ?esh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of unful?lled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken. Like former productions of this pen, Jude the Obscure is simply an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings,* or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the ?rst moment. August ????. xliv Jude the Obscure POSTSCRIPT The issue of this book sixteen years ago, with the explanatory Preface given above, was followed by unexpected incidents, and one can now look back for a moment at what happened. Within a day or two of its publication the reviewers pronounced upon it in tones to which the reception of Tess of the d’Urbervilles bore no comparison, though there were two or three dissentients from the chorus. This salutation of the story in England was instantly cabled to America, and the music was reinforced on that side of the Atlantic in a shrill crescendo. In my own eyes the sad feature of the attack was that the greater part of the story––that which presented the shattered ideals of the two chief characters, and had been more especially, and indeed almost exclusively, the part of interest to myself––was practically ignored by the adverse press of the two countries; the while that some twenty or thirty pages of sorry detail deemed necessary to complete the narrative, and show the antitheses in Jude’s life, were almost the sole portions read and regarded. And curiously enough, a reprint the next year of a fantastic tale that had been published in a family paper some time before, drew down upon my head a continuation of the same sort of invective from several quarters. So much for the unhappy beginning of Jude’s career as a book. After these verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop––probably in his despair at not being able to burn me––and his advertisement of his meritorious act in the papers. Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work––austere in its treatment of a di?cult subject––as if the writer had not all the time said that it was in the Preface. Thereupon many uncursed me, and the matter ended, the only e?ect of it on human conduct that I could discover being its e?ect on myself––the experience completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing. One incident among many arising from the storm of words was that an American man of letters, who did not whitewash his own morals, informed me that, having bought a copy of the book on the strength of the shocked criticisms, he read on and on, wondering when the harmfulness was going to begin, and at last ?ung it across Preface xlv the room with execrations at having been induced by the rascally reviewers to waste a dollar-and-half on what he was pleased to call ‘a religious and ethical treatise.’ I sympathized with him, and assured him honestly that the misrepresentations had been no collusive trick of mine to increase my circulation among the subscribers to the papers in question. Then there was the case of the lady who having shuddered at the book in an in?uential article bearing intermediate headlines of horror, and printed in a world-read journal, wrote to me shortly afterwards that it was her desire to make my acquaintance. To return, however, to the book itself. The marriage laws being used in great part as the tragic machinery of the tale, and its general drift on the domestic side tending to show that, in Diderot’s words, the civil law should be only the enunciation of the law of nature (a statement that requires some quali?cation, by the way), I have been charged since ???? with a large responsibility in this country for the present ‘shop-soiled’ condition of the marriage theme (as a learned writer characterized it the other day). I do not know. My opinion at that time, if I remember rightly, was what it is now, that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties––being then essentially and morally no marriage––and it seemed a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy, told for its own sake as a presentation of particulars containing a good deal that was universal, and not without a hope that certain cathartic, Aristotelian qualities might be found therein. The di?culties down to twenty or thirty years back of acquiring knowledge in letters without pecuniary means were used in the same way; though I was informed that some readers thought these episodes an attack on venerable institutions, and that when Ruskin College* was subsequently founded it should have been called the College of Jude the Obscure. Artistic e?ort always pays heavily for ?nding its tragedies in the forced adaptation of human instincts to rusty and irksome moulds that do not ?t them. To do Bludyer and the con?agratory bishop justice, what they meant seems to have been only this: ‘We Britons hate ideas, and we are going to live up to that privilege of our native country. Your picture may not show the untrue, or the uncommon, or even be contrary to the canons of art; but it is not the view of life that we who thrive on conventions can permit to be painted.’ xlvi Jude the Obscure But what did it matter. As for the matrimonial scenes, in spite of their ‘touching the spot,’ and the screaming of a poor lady in Blackwood that there was an unholy anti-marriage league afoot, the famous contract––sacrament I mean––is doing fairly well still, and people marry and give in what may or may not be true marriage as lightheartedly as ever. The author has even been reproached by some earnest correspondents that he has left the question where he found it, and has not pointed the way to a much-needed reform. After the issue of Jude the Obscure as a serial story in Germany, an experienced reviewer of that country informed the writer that Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was the ?rst delineation in ?ction of the woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year–– the woman of the feminist movement––the slight, pale ‘bachelor’ girl––the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises. The regret of this critic was that the portrait of the newcomer had been left to be drawn by a man, and was not done by one of her own sex, who would never have allowed her to break down at the end. Whether this assurance is borne out by dates I cannot say. Nor am I able, across the gap of years since the production of the novel, to exercise more criticism upon it of a general kind than extends to a few verbal corrections, whatever, good or bad, it may contain. And no doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously puts there, which will help either to its pro?t or to its disadvantage as the case may be. T. H. April ????. CONTENTS PART FIRST ?? ?????????, i.–xi. ? PART SECOND ?? ?????????????, i.–vii. ?? PART THIRD ?? ??????????, i.–x. ??? PART FOURTH ?? ???????, i.–vi. ??? PART FIFTH ?? ??????????? ??? ?????????, i.–viii. ??? PART SIXTH ?? ????????????? ?????, i.-xi. ??? This page intentionally left blank PART FIRST AT MARYGREEN ‘Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women. . . . O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus?’ E?????* ?? ????????? I.–i. T?? schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles o?, such a vehicle proving of quite su?cient size for the departing teacher’s e?ects. For the schoolhouse had been partly furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house. The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the new school-teacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything would be smooth again. The blacksmith, the farm baili?, and the schoolmaster himself were standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster,* the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary lodgings just at ?rst. A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: ‘Aunt have got a great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve found a place to settle in, sir.’ ‘A proper good notion,’ said the blacksmith. It was decided that a deputation should wait on the boy’s aunt–– an old maiden resident––and ask her if she would house the piano till Mr. Phillotson should send for it. The smith and the baili? started to see the practicability of the suggested shelter, and the boy and the schoolmaster were left standing alone. ? Jude the Obscure ‘Sorry I am going, Jude?’* asked the latter kindly. Tears rose into the boy’s eyes; for he was not among the regular day scholars who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, but one who had attended the night school only during the present teacher’s term of o?ce. The regular scholars, if the truth must be told, stood at the present moment afar o?, like certain historic disciples,* indisposed to any enthusiastic volunteering of aid. The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that he was sorry. ‘So am I,’ said Mr. Phillotson. ‘Why do you go, sir?’ asked the boy. ‘Ah––that would be a long story. You wouldn’t understand my reasons, Jude. You will perhaps when you are older.’ ‘I think I should now, sir.’ ‘Well––don’t speak of this everywhere. You know what a university is, and a university degree? It is the necessary hallmark of a man who wants to do anything in teaching. My scheme, or dream, is to be a university graduate, and then to be ordained. By going to live at Christminster, or near it, I shall be at headquarters, so to speak, and if my scheme is practicable at all, I consider that being on the spot will a?ord me a better chance of carrying it out than I should have elsewhere.’ The smith and his companion returned. Old Miss Fawley’s fuelhouse was dry and eminently practicable; and she seemed willing to give the instrument standing-room there. It was accordingly left in the school till the evening, when more hands would be available for removing it, and the schoolmaster gave a ?nal glance round. The boy Jude assisted in loading some small articles, and at nine o’clock Mr. Phillotson mounted beside his box of books and other impedimenta, and bade his friends goodbye. ‘I shan’t forget you, Jude,’ he said smiling, as the cart moved o?. ‘Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can. And if ever you come to Christminster remember you hunt me out for old acquaintance sake.’ The cart creaked across the green, and disappeared round the corner by the rectory-house. The boy returned to the draw-well at the edge of the greensward, where he had left his buckets when he went to help his patron and teacher in the loading. There was a At Marygreen ? quiver in his lip now, and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the frame-work, his face wearing the ?xity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his time. The well into which he was looking was as ancient as the village itself, and from his present position appeared as a long circular perspective ending in a shining disk of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down. There was a lining of green moss near the top, and, nearer still the hart’s-tongue fern. He said to himself, in the melodramatic tones of a whimsical boy, that the schoolmaster had drawn at that well scores of times on a morning like this, and would never draw there any more. ‘I’ve seen him look down into it, when he was tired with his drawing just as I do now, and when he rested a bit before carrying the buckets home. But he was too clever to bide here any longer––a small sleepy place like this!’ A tear rolled from his eye into the depths of the well. The morning was a little foggy, and the boy’s breathing unfurled itself as a thicker fog upon the still and heavy air. His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden outcry: ‘Bring on that water, will ye, you idle young harlican!’ It came from an old woman who had emerged from her door towards the garden gate of a green-thatched cottage not far o?. The boy quickly waved a signal of assent, drew the water with what was a great e?ort for one of his stature, landed and emptied the big bucket into his own pair of smaller ones, and pausing a moment for breath, started with them across the patch of clammy greensward whereon the well stood––nearly in the centre of the little village, or rather hamlet of Marygreen.* It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and many trees felled on the green. Above all the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped,* had been taken down and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the ?ower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a ? Jude the Obscure tall new building of modern Gothic* design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteenpenny cast-iron crosses warranted to last ?ve years. I.–ii. S?????? as was Jude Fawley’s frame he bore the two brimming house-buckets of water to the cottage without resting. Over the door was a little rectangular piece of blue board, on which was painted in yellow letters, ‘Drusilla Fawley, Baker.’ Within the little lead panes of the window––this being one of the few old houses left––were ?ve bottles of sweets, and three buns on a plate of the willow pattern.* While emptying the buckets at the back of the house he could hear an animated conversation in progress within-doors between his great-aunt, the Drusilla of the signboard, and some other villagers. Having seen the schoolmaster depart they were summing up particulars of the event, and indulging in predictions of his future. ‘And who’s he?’ asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy entered. ‘Well ye med ask it Mrs. Williams. He’s my great-nephew––come since you was last this way.’ The old inhabitant who answered was a tall, gaunt woman who spoke tragically on the most trivial subject, and gave a phrase of her conversation to each auditor in turn. ‘He come from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago,* worse luck for ’n, Belinda’ (turning to the right) ‘where his father was living, and was took wi’ the shakings for death, and died in two days, as you know Caroline’ (turning to the left). ‘It would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too wi’ thy mother and father, poor useless boy! But I’ve got him here to stay with me till I can see what’s to be done with un, though I am obliged to let him earn any penny he can. Just now he’s a-scaring of birds for Farmer Troutham. It keeps him out of mischty. Why do ye turn away, Jude?’ she continued as the boy, feeling the impact of their glances like slaps upon his face, moved aside. The local washerwoman replied that it was perhaps a very good plan of Miss or Mrs. Fawley’s (as they called her indi?erently) to have him with her––‘to kip ’ee company in your loneliness, fetch water, shet the winder-shetters o’ nights, and help in the bit o’ baking.’ Miss Fawley doubted it. . . . ‘Why didn’t ye get the schoolmaster to take ’ee to Christminster wi’ un, and make a scholar of ’ee,’ she ? Jude the Obscure continued, in frowning pleasantry. ‘I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same, so I’ve heard, but I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her husband after they were married didn’ get a house of their own for some year or more; and then they only had one till––well, I won’t go into that. Jude my child, don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come. Ah, that a little maid should know such changes!’ Jude, ?nding the general attention again centering on himself, went out to the bakehouse, where he ate the cake provided for his breakfast. The end of his spare time had now arrived, and emerging from the garden by getting over the hedge at the back, he pursued a path northward, till he came to a wide and lonely depression in the general level of the upland, which was sown as a corn-?eld. This vast concave was the scene of his labours for Mr. Troutham, the farmer, and he descended into the midst of it. The brown surface of the ?eld went right up towards the sky all round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge, and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. ‘How ugly it is here!’ he murmured. The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that of the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare––echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site ?rst or last of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on every square yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made up there between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the ?eld from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would At Marygreen ? not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest, and in that ancient corn?eld many a man had made love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after ful?lling them in the church adjoining. But this neither Jude nor the rooks around him considered. For them it was a lonely place, possessing in the one view only the quality of a work-ground, and in the other that of a granary good to feed in. The boy stood under the rick before mentioned, and every few seconds used his clacker or rattle briskly. At each clack the rooks left o? pecking, and rose and went away on their leisurely wings, burnished like tassets of mail, afterwards wheeling back and regarding him warily, and descending to feed at a more respectful distance. He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should he frighten them away? They took upon them more and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners––the only friends he could claim as being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted anew. ‘Poor little dears!’ said Jude, aloud. ‘You shall have some dinner you shall! There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can a?ord to let you have some. Eat, then, my dear little birdies, and make a good meal!’ They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own. His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean and sordid instrument, o?ensive both to the birds and to himself as their friend. All at once he became conscious of a smart blow upon his buttocks, followed by a loud clack, which announced to his surprised senses that the clacker had been the instrument of o?ence used. The birds and Jude started up simultaneously, and the dazed eyes of the latter beheld the farmer in person, the great Troutham himself, his red face glaring down upon Jude’s cowering frame, the clacker swinging in his hand. ‘So it’s “Eat, my dear birdies,” is it, young man! “Eat dear birdies,” indeed! I’ll tickle your breeches and see if you say “Eat, dear ?? Jude the Obscure birdies,” again in a hurry! And you’ve been idling at the schoolmaster’s too, instead of coming here, ha’n’t ye hey! That’s how you earn your sixpence a day for keeping the rooks o? my corn!’ Whilst saluting Jude’s ears with this impassioned rhetoric, Troutham had seized his left hand with his own left, and swinging his slim frame round him at arm’s-length, again struck Jude on the hind parts with the ?at side of Jude’s own rattle, till the ?eld echoed with the blows, which were delivered once or twice at each revolution. ‘Don’t ’ee, sir––please don’t ’ee!’ cried the whirling child, as helpless under the centrifugal tendency of his person as a hooked ?sh swinging to land, and beholding the hill, the rick, the plantation, the path, and the rooks going round and round him in an amazing circular race. ‘I––I––sir––only meant that––there was a good crop in the ground––I saw ’em sow it––and the rooks could have a little bit for dinner––and you wouldn’t miss it, sir––and Mr. Phillotson said I was to be kind to ’em––O, O, O!’ This truthful explanation seemed to exasperate the farmer even more than if Jude had stoutly denied saying anything at all; and he still smacked the whirling urchin, the clacks of the instrument continuing to resound all across the ?eld and as far as the ears of distant workers who gathered thereupon that Jude was pursuing his business of clacking with great assiduity and echoing from the brandnew church tower just behind the mist, towards the building of which structure the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for God and man. Presently Troutham grew tired of his punitive task, and depositing the quivering boy on his legs, took a sixpence from his pocket and gave it him in payment for his day’s work, telling him to go home and never let him see him in one of those ?elds again. Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway weeping; not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the ?aw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life. With this shadow on his mind he did not care to show himself in ...