Jude and Consequences

Abstract

When serial publication of Jude the Obscure in the American and European editions of Harper’s magazine was agreed before the end of 1893, Hardy promised ‘a tale that could not offend the most fastidious maiden’. It was still called ‘The Simpletons’ when the December instalment was published; with the second Hardy reverted to his original title ‘Hearts Insurgent’, after learning that Charles Reade’s A Simpleton had appeared in Harper’s. He would have altered it again, to ‘The Recalcitrants’, had not sheets for the January number gone to press. Not surprisingly, after planning, replanning, and even wondering whether to continue his story, he found his inspiration and zeal uncertain. In January 1894 he informed Mrs Henniker that he was ‘creeping on a little’ with it, and becoming interested in his heroine, though she was ‘very nebulous’. Almost three months later, finding that ‘the story was carrying him into unexpected fields and he was afraid to predict its future trend’, he requested Harper & Brothers to cancel his contract. The iron had entered his soul; doubts and hesitations had vanished, and he intended to write for ‘men and women of full age’, whatever the consequences. The Parnell controversy had made the question of the legality of loveless marriages a public issue, and his resolve to sustain it, either when he began The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved or when he decided to fictionalize the topic afresh in Jude, may have been fortified by the 1891 article ‘Public Life and Private Morals’ in the Fortnightly Review, which contended that the legal aspect of a marriage union is ‘merely its husk and shell’ if men and women are bound to each other when they have ‘neither love nor sympathy’ or are suited ‘neither by age nor by temperament’.