Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Many Other Verses
.
BBC is set up.
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
xxxviii

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Life
Historical and Cultural Background
 Dramatized version of Tess
performed at Dorchester.
Hardy is infatuated with the
local woman, Gertrude
Bugler, who plays Tess.
First Labour Government formed by
Ramsay Macdonald.
Forster, A Passage to India
 Human Shows, Far Phantasies,
Songs and Tri
fles.
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
  January: Hardy dies. His
heart is buried in Emma’s
grave at Stinsford, his ashes in
Westminster Abbey. Winter
Words in Various Moods and
Metres
published post-
humously. Hardy’s brother,
Henry, dies.
Vote is extended to women over 
.
Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Woolf, Orlando
– 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.
Chronology
xxxix

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JUDE THE OBSCURE
‘The letter killeth’

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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
fly
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 ver-
sion was for various reasons an abridged and modi
fied one, the pres-
ent edition being the 
first in which the whole appears as originally
written. And in the di
fficulty 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 
final 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
ffectedly 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 
flesh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of
unful
filled 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 dis-
cordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded
as not of the 
first moment.
August
.

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POSTSCRIPT
The issue of this book sixteen years ago, with the explanatory Pref-
ace 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
fficult 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
ffect of it on human conduct that I
could discover being its e
ffect 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 
flung it across
xliv
Jude the Obscure

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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 mis-
representations 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
fluential 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
fication, 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