In brief
Jude Fawley, an orphan boy scaring rooks for a farmer in a Wessex village, climbs a ladder one evening and sees the lights of Christminster on the horizon. He teaches himself Latin and Greek while driving a baker’s cart and learning the mason’s trade. A local girl, Arabella, traps him into marriage with a false pregnancy; she leaves for Australia; he goes to the city, cuts stone for colleges that will not admit him, and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead. Sue marries his old schoolmaster Phillotson, cannot bear it, and leaves. She and Jude live together unmarried, and are hounded from town to town. Then Jude’s son by Arabella hangs Sue’s two children and himself. Sue, broken, returns to Phillotson as a penance, Jude is tricked back into marriage with Arabella, and he dies alone while a university festival cheers outside the window.
The novel is Thomas Hardy’s last, and the one that made the most noise. It deserves remembering less for the scandal than for its intelligence about how a mind gets ahead of its time, and what the body and the neighbours do about that.
The argument
Reviewers took Jude for a tract against marriage, and Hardy’s own later account shows why they were half right: the marriage laws, he wrote, were “the tragic machinery of the tale”. But machinery is not subject. His preface names the subject as “the tragedy of unfulfilled aims” (Preface), and the book’s real claim is broader. The institutions of late Victorian England are built for people who do not exist. Sue says it best: “the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns” (4.1).
The novel tests this on three fronts, and Sue herself counts them after the worst night of her life: “First it said, ‘You shan’t learn!’ Then it said, ‘You shan’t labour!’ Now it says, ‘You shan’t love!’” (6.2). Learning is the Master of Biblioll College, who advises him that he has a better chance “by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade” (2.6), to which Jude replies by chalking a verse of Job on the college wall. Labour is the scene where he and Sue are sacked from re-lettering the Ten Commandments in a church because the congregation has heard they are not married (5.6). Love is everything else.
The crucial exchange comes next. Sue, in her grief, reads all this as the wrath of a Power, and says “It is no use fighting against God!” Jude answers: “It is only against man and senseless circumstance” (6.3). That line is the book’s position. There is no fate here, as there sometimes seems to be in Tess. There are rules made by people, the people who enforce them, and bad luck. Sue’s description of her marriage, “none of the natural tragedies of love” but “a tragedy artificially manufactured” (4.2), is the thing Hardy most wants understood: it could be otherwise, and that makes it worse. Jude’s own conclusion near the end is historical, not religious. “Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us” (6.10).
The shape of the book
Six parts, each named for a place: At Marygreen, At Christminster, At Melchester, At Shaston, At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere, At Christminster Again. The titles are bare as a mason’s list of jobs, and they describe a life of being moved on. The return to Christminster in Part Sixth is the cruellest structural decision in the book. Jude brings his family back to the city on Remembrance Day, out of homesickness for a place that has never wanted him, and they are turned away from its lodgings.
Inside this the book is built on crossings. Jude begins as a believer who wants to be ordained, and Sue as a sceptic who buys statuettes of Venus and Apollo and hides them among her Anglican work (2.3). By the end he has burned his theology and she is saying “We must conform!” (6.3). The two of them pass each other and do not stop. The marriages cross the same way: Jude and Arabella, Sue and Phillotson, then each divorced, then Jude and Sue unmarried, then the two original pairs legally remarried and each in hell. It is close to geometry, and the tidiness is what makes it frightening: it is the pattern of a trap.
The voice
The style here is thinner and faster than in Tess. There is less landscape, fewer set pieces, more talk, and a narrator with less patience. Jude as a boy opens his long-awaited Latin grammar and finds that it does not contain the magic key he imagined; he wishes some kind person would come and tell him how languages are really learned. “But nobody did come, because nobody does” (1.4). That is the sentence of the whole book, and it comes in chapter four.
Hardy’s bluntness extends to the physical. Arabella introduces herself by throwing a “piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow-pig” at Jude’s head (1.6). When the pig is killed in the snow after their marriage, Jude wants to end it quickly and Arabella wants it slow, so that the meat bleeds properly. “Poor folks must live,” she tells him scornfully (1.10). The boy who was beaten for feeding the rooks, because “mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another” (1.2), has grown into a man who must stick the pig. Phillotson later states the generalisation: “Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society” (5.8).
Then in the last third the novel’s realism gives way to something else. Little Father Time arrives by train: “He was Age masquerading as Juvenility” (5.3), not a child but an idea of the future with a half-ticket in his hatband. Many readers think he breaks the book, and on any realist account he does. I do not think realism survives the hanging anyway. The note the boy leaves, “Done because we are too menny” (6.2), is effective precisely because of the misspelling, which is the only childlike thing about him. What does overreach is the doctor who explains it as “the coming universal wish not to live”; and even there Hardy undercuts him, since Jude can only add, “He’s an advanced man, the Doctor.”
The question of Sue
Sue Bridehead has always been the novel’s centre of argument. She reads Mill and quotes him at her husband in a marital dispute (4.3). She has lived with an undergraduate who died of it, she says she has “no fear of men”, and she mixes with them “almost as one of their own sex” (3.4). She wades a river to escape her training college and sits in Jude’s Sunday suit while her dress dries. She jumps out of a window when Phillotson blunders into her room by accident (4.4). She wants love and refuses possession, and she keeps Jude waiting, in a way the novel does not excuse, until Arabella’s return frightens her into his bed.
In the 1912 postscript Hardy reports a German reviewer’s opinion that Sue was the first portrait in fiction of the “woman of the feminist movement”, and that reviewer’s regret that a woman had not drawn her, since a woman “would never have allowed her to break down at the end”. Hardy’s own phrase for the type, “intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves”, is unkind and clear-eyed. Penny Boumelha, in Thomas Hardy and Women (1982), places her among the New Woman heroines of the 1890s while showing how she differs from the type. D. H. Lawrence, who could not leave her alone, tried to work out her sexuality in his study of Hardy, written in 1914.
The German critic’s regret is the question worth keeping. Does Sue’s collapse show that Hardy could not imagine her surviving? I think not quite. She does not collapse because of a doctrine or because of nerves; she collapses because, the night before, she told a boy who was already asking whether he should have been born that another baby was coming (6.2). That guilt is real, and it would break anyone. What happens next, “self-abnegation is the higher road” (6.3) and the deliberate walk to Phillotson’s bedroom (6.9), is a brilliant mind using its full power against itself. It is the most terrible thing in Hardy.
The people
Jude Fawley
Jude is gentle to a fault, unable to step on a worm, and weak for drink and for women, both of which the novel treats as facts about the body rather than sins. He is also a serious craftsman, and the book gives him one moment of vision: “a true illumination”, that the stone-yard was “as worthy as that dignified by the name of scholarly study” (2.2). He loses it almost at once. His speech to the Remembrance Day crowd is his real graduation: “It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one”, and “I am in a chaos of principles” (6.1).
Arabella Donn
Arabella is the coarsest thing in the novel and one of the most alive. She lies, schemes, marries bigamously and gets Jude drunk to remarry him (6.7). She is also the one person who reads people accurately and never lies to herself. Hardy gives her the last words, over Jude’s body, and they are about Sue: “She’s never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he is now!” (6.11).
Richard Phillotson
Phillotson, the schoolmaster who leaves Marygreen in the first chapter with a piano and a dream of a degree, is the novel’s quiet surprise. He is dull and unattractive, and he does the most generous thing in the book: he lets his wife go, against the advice of his friend Gillingham (4.4), and is dismissed for it (4.6). When he takes her back, in a remarriage that is both kindness and punishment, Hardy lets you feel how far decency can decay.
Little Father Time
The boy’s real name is Jude. He is the son of a loveless marriage who arrives with no one to meet him, and he is the book’s prophecy that the next generation will know too much.
How it was made
Hardy’s preface gives the dates: a scheme “jotted down in 1890, from notes made in 1887 and onward”, suggested partly by “the death of a woman”, most likely his cousin Tryphena Sparks. The failure and suicide of his friend Horace Moule may lie behind it too. Hardy, like Jude, could not afford Oxford or Cambridge, and read Latin and Greek before and after a working day, though he had the luck of an architect’s office where Jude had a mason’s yard.
The serial ran in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine from December 1894 to November 1895, bowdlerised, under the titles The Simpletons and then Hearts Insurgent. The book appeared in November 1895, dated 1896, “the first in which the whole appears as originally written”. The Gutenberg text used here carries the 1895 preface but not the postscript Hardy added in April 1912, which is worth seeking out; Standard Ebooks includes it. Emma Hardy disliked the book for its religion and for what people might suppose it said about her marriage.
Readers and critics
The reception is the most famous in English fiction of the period. A reviewer called it Jude the Obscene. Edmund Gosse, a friend, called it “a very gloomy, it is even a grimy, story” and later asked what Providence had done to Hardy to make him shake his fist at his Creator. Margaret Oliphant’s “The Anti-Marriage League” in Blackwood’s for January 1896 denounced its indecency. William Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, said publicly that he had burned his copy. Hardy’s reply in 1912 was that the book’s next misfortune was “to be burnt by a bishop—probably in his despair at not being able to burn me”. He also records an American who bought the book for the promised filth, read on wondering when the harm would begin, and flung it across the room as “a religious and ethical treatise”.
Hardy claimed the affair ended by “completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing”. It is a good line, though C. H. Sisson called the idea that the reviews stopped him “superficial and absurd”. Havelock Ellis defended the novel at length in The Savoy in 1896. Terry Eagleton’s introduction of 1974 attacked the old reading of it as “the tragedy of an oversexed peasant boy” and put class and history back at the centre. Its sexual frankness has stopped being news; what remains shocking is the sentence about nobody coming.
Afterlives
Hardy noted drily that some readers thought Ruskin College, founded in Oxford for working men, should have been named “the College of Jude the Obscure”. The adaptations are fewer than Tess’s. The BBC made a six-part serial with Robert Powell and Fiona Walker in 1971; Michael Winterbottom filmed it as Jude (1996), with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet, and did not flinch from the hanging. Howard Brenton’s play Jude (2019) turned the hero into a Syrian refugee, a woman working as a cleaner and visited by Euripides: the gate is still there, only further along the wall.
How to read it
- Read it as a novel about ideas. Sue and Jude’s talk is the action, and it is unusually good talk; they are funny together before they are doomed.
- Do not skip Part Fifth. Readers rush towards the disaster, but the happy, hounded, cake-selling years at Aldbrickham and Kennetbridge are what is being destroyed.
- Find the 1912 postscript. Read it after the end, along with the preface, for Hardy’s own bitter gaiety about the affair.
- Follow the final chapter’s hurrahs. Hardy interleaves a dying man’s quotations from Job with the cheers from the river; it is an unforgettable piece of arrangement.
Read next
- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). The companion tragedy, warmer and more beautiful, written just before it.
- George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891). The cost of the intellectual life for people without money, in London and with no illusions.
- Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (1895). A heroine who refuses marriage on principle, published the same year; the comparison flatters Hardy.
- E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910). Leonard Bast is Jude’s younger cousin, the self-improving clerk seen from the drawing room.
- D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915). The novelist who learned most from Sue, working the same ground with far more hope.