Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

PART SECOND
 ‘Save his own soul he hath no star’: Algernon Swinburne (–):
Prelude to Songs before Sunrise
.
‘Notitiam
. . . amor’: Ovid, Metamorphoses 
. –: ‘Nearness led to
awareness and the 
first steps; love grew with time.’ The two epigraphs
relate to Jude’s academic aspirations and to his love for Sue.
 Dick Whittington: reference to a legendary story of an orphan boy who
became Lord Mayor of London. There was a mayor of that name who
died in 
.
Beersheba
(
,  also): MS has ‘Capernaum’ and Jude later refers to
Christminster as ‘Capharnaum’, a faithless town. See note to p. 

below.
Explanatory Notes


---

 A bell . . . a hundred: ‘Great Tom’, a bell from Osney Abbey, was
installed in Tom Tower at Christ Church in 
. It rings  times
every evening at 
. p.m. The number of rings is that of the original
number of students in the college. The bell-ringing marked the time for
the closure of all college gates.
 There were poets abroad . . . gentle-voiced prelate: the absence of names
for the spectres appeals to the reader’s assumed knowledge. Hardy pro-
vided a key in a letter to Florence Henniker (Collected Letters ii. 
).
eulogist of Shakespeare
: Ben Jonson (?
–); him who has recently:
Robert Browning (
–); musical one: Algernon Swinburne (–
); Tractarians were contributors to Tracts for the Times (–), the
High Church essays; enthusiast: John Henry Newman (
–), con-
verted to Catholicism in 
; poet: John Keble (–); formularist:
Edward Pusey (
–); rake, reasoner, and sceptic: Lord Bolingbroke
(
–); historian: Edward Gibbon (–); he who apologized:
Hardy says ‘can’t remember’––he remains unidenti
fied; saintly author:
Bishop Thomas Ken (
–); itinerant preacher: John Wesley (–
); one of the spectres: Arnold here quotes the Preface to his Essays in
Criticism
(
); Corn Law convert: Sir Robert Peel (–), who
quotes his speech of May 
; sly author: a reference to chapter  of
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; shade of the poet: Robert Browning, a quota-
tion from ‘By the Fireside’; author of the Apologia: Newman; the second of
them
: Keble, a quotation from his poems The Christian Year (
); genial
Spectator
: Joseph Addison (
–), an inaccurate quotation from his
Spectator
, 
; gentle-voiced prelate: Ken. There is no meaningful sequence
in the listing of authors, no linked theme for quotations.
 ogee dome: the dome of Tom Tower is not shaped like a simple bell but
has an S-curve which resembles the curve of an onion.
‘For wisdom
. . . them that have it’: Ecclesiastes 
: .
 Sue’s father: MS ‘Sue’s parents’; cf. p.  above and p.  below.
Evangelical
: belonging to the wing of the Anglican Church that disliked
ritual and stressed the importance of personal conversion to Christianity
involving an emotional as well as an intellectual commitment.
 Cardinal College: Christ Church, founded by Cardinal Wolsey in 
as Cardinal College. It was refounded after the reformation under its
present name.
 Hermon: a high mountain referred to in the Old Testament, and some-
times said to be the scene of Jesus’ trans
figuration (Mark : –). The
suggestion seems to be that Jude is transformed; this is another of the
Christ references: see note to p. 
 above. Cyprus, the landing place of
Aphrodite, goddess of love, is contrasted with Galilee, the symbol of
Christianity, a recurring contrast in the novel at this stage.
 the Venus and the Apollo: Sue’s purchases indicate her alleged choice of a
life of pagan joyousness; Venus was the goddess of erotic love and Apollo
the god of youth, beauty and light, or the sun-god.
Explanatory Notes


---

 Julian the Apostate: the Roman emperor who, according to Gibbon, was
converted to paganism in 
 . Sue’s pagan inclinations are hinted at
here.
‘Thou hast conquered
. . . breath!’: from Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proser-
pine’, referring to what were, traditionally, Julian’s dying words: ‘Vicisti,
Galilaee’, the Galilean being, of course, Christ, here seen as a life-
denying force.
 ‘All hemin . . . autou’:  Corinthians : : ‘But to us there is but one God,
the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus
Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.’
 tempted unto seventy times seven: in Matthew : – it is persistence in
forgiveness of which the phrase is used; an example of Jude’s biblical
allusions that typically contradict the spirit of what he cites.
erotolepsy
: sex-mania; evidently a coinage by Hardy.
 meet you just there: the spot where Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer were
burnt by Mary I. Sue’s wish to avoid ‘martyrdom’ is unful
filled.
 his face was almost hidden . . . Mount of Olives: another association of Jude
with Christ. See note to p. 
 above. Contrast pp.  and .
 She was brought up by her father: this agrees with p.  above, but conflicts
with p. 
 where it is her mother who took her to London.
 recollections: MS deletes: ‘As he says he’ll provide for her, and has no
chick or chile of his own by all account, I don’t see why he shouldn’t do
all he says.’ A reference to the Provost, Sue’s adoptive father.
‘Excelsior’
: by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (
–).
‘The Raven’
: by Edgar Allen Poe (
–).
 to borrow . . . writer: Thomas Carlyle (–) wrote in Sartor
Resartus
: ‘their stillness was but the rest of in
finite motion, the sleep of a
spinning top’ (bk. I, ch. III).
 Provosts, Wardens, and other Heads of Houses: the principals of Oxford
Colleges have various names: Provost, Warden, Master, President, Dean,
Rector.
 the fatuousness of Crusoe: the shipwrecked Crusoe made a boat too big to
drag to the water.
Heine
’s: from Götterdämmerung by Heinrich Heine (
–).
a singularly built theatre
: the Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Sir Chris-
topher Wren (
–), is the central university building where
degree ceremonies take place.
 Biblioll: A mixture of the name of Balliol College and biblio––‘book’.
 Fourways: the crossroads called Carfax at the centre of Oxford. Fourways
is a literal translation of the etymological origin of Carfax (cf. French
carrefour
).
 Job: for instances of Jude and others equating him with ‘the upright man
laughed to scorn’ see note to p. 
.
Explanatory Notes


---

 That the one affined soul . . . the real Christminster life (,  also):
MS has Jude troubled only by her ‘bright eyes and tender voice’. The
latter reading is characteristic of the greater simplicity and spontaneity of
Sue in the 
first draft. See also pp. , , , , , ,  for
similar changes towards a more ‘elusive’ 
figure from  on.
Bower o’ Bliss
: this nickname for a prostitute refers to the Bower of Bliss
in The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (c. 
–) described in book
, a place where a virtuous knight is tempted into sensuality by
half-naked maidens.
 And every fool knows . . . creed: Jude is right. The Nicene Creed was
adopted by the Council in 
 ; the Apostles’, in its present form at
least, is later.
 the Ratcatcher’s Daughter: a comic street ballad dealing with the death
of a ratcatcher’s daughter and her lamenting lover’s suicide.
 what a poor Christ he made: John : ; another self-equation of Jude with
Christ. See note to p. 
 above and note to p.  below for Phillotson as
Christ as on p. 
.
Laocoon
: an ironically prophetic simile from the narrator referring to the
ancient statue of the Trojan priest and his two sons crushed to death by
serpents for o
ffending Apollo.
Highbridge
: all texts until 
 have ‘Highridge’.
 licentiate: one not an ordained priest who is licensed only to preach.