Jude the Obscure: Origins in Life and Literature

Abstract

Hardy’s life was relatively uneventful, and but for his creative imagination and literary successes it would not have been very exciting; it certainly was not very sensational, apart from the effect on the public of works such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Why a story of dreams or aspirations and continual failure, of inveiglement into marriage by seduction, of broken marriages, unmarried lovers who live together and rear children only to find them hanged, of marriages which please God in the eyes of the Church and lead to suicide and spiritual death — why Jude the Obscure, in short — should have led early reviewers to deduce that it was ‘honest autobiography’ must surely occasion some surprise. Not until nearly twenty-four years later, when he was roused by a letter from ‘an inquirer with whom the superstition still lingered’, did Hardy trouble to reply, dictating a letter to his wife Florence, who wrote: ‘To your enquiry if Jude the Obscure is autobiographical, I have to answer that there is not a scrap of personal detail in it, it having the least to do with his own life of all his books.’ When, in the course of preparing his Life, he reached the period ending with the 1895–96 reviews of Jude, he reverted to this letter, and added:

Some of the incidents were real in so far as that he had heard of them, or come in contact with them when they were occurring to people he knew; but no more. It is interesting to mention that on his way to school he did once meet with a youth like Jude who drove the bread-cart of a widow, a baker, like Mrs Fawley, and carried on his studies at the same time, to the serious risk of other drivers in the lanes; which youth asked him to lend him his Latin grammar.¹