Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

part of the story does ‘the spirit’ give life.
The account of failed academic hopes has, unlike the sexual story,
often been read simplistically, particularly when taken as a re
flection
of Hardy’s own university hopes thwarted by poverty and lack of
in
fluence. But the autobiography must have been unexpectedly self-
critical, since the narrator makes clear from the start the delusory
nature of the boy’s quest. Visually it is uncertain whether at 
first he
really sees Christminster at all or merely the city ‘miraged in the
peculiar atmosphere’, ‘hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith’.
And at his last view before going there he is not sure of anything
about the city except that it ‘had seemed to be visible’. He fosters
this visual sham on his 
first night in the city, when passing ‘objects
out of harmony with its general expression’ he allows his eyes to ‘slip
over them as if he did not see them’. He imagines alleys ‘apparently
never trodden now by the foot of man’ whose ‘very existence seemed
to be forgotten’. The accounts he has of the place come from
unreliable and vague witnesses: the carter recounting a report, the
witch-like old woman.
Although as a child he recognizes (or thinks he does) a ‘city of
light’ where ‘the tree of knowledge grows’, and which is a ‘ship
manned by scholarship and religion’, the object of Jude’s adult ambi-
tion is oddly ambiguous. The learning which he so painfully
acquired and proudly lists until brought back to earth by a slap from
a pig’s penis is already at this stage inextricable for him from religion
or scholarship as a profession, with salary attached. In the early
stages the narrator speaks of him as a ‘prospective D.D., Professor,
Introduction
xii

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Bishop, or what not’, and fellowships were the entrance to both
scholarly and ecclesiastical preferment.
2
For Jude to become an
undergraduate and then a graduate is to appropriate middle-class
culture and status in one, a fact he is startlingly aware of. This is why
when he meets Arabella he is exultantly listing his achievements in
Classics and Mathemetics, those requirements for access to the ‘lib-
eral education’ which Oxford defended vehemently for most of the
nineteenth century as superior to and subsuming vocational sub-
jects.
3
They open the professional gates to Jude, or so he thinks:
‘ “These things are only a beginning . . . I’ll be D.D. before I have
done! . . .” And then he continued to dream, and thought that he
might become even a bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise,
Christian life. And what an example he would set! If his income were
£
 a year, he would give away £ in one form and another,
and live sumptuously (for him) on the remainder.’
Rejected by the colleges, he passes on to self-delusion, as the
narrator makes clear, when he talks to the curate, Highbridge, about
his failure, ‘dwelling with an unconscious bias less on the intellectual
and ambitious side of his dream, and more upon the theological’: ‘ “I
don’t regret the collapse of my university hopes one jot . . . I don’t
care for social success any more
. . . I bitterly regret the church, and
the loss of my chance of being her ordained minister.” ’ (My italics.)
Rather disconcertingly for the reader, the narrator, whose sym-
pathy with Jude has been acute so far, now berates him for ‘mundane
ambition masquerading in a surplice’ and rebukes him for that social
unrest, that desire for upward mobility, which from the 
s had
been an explicit reason for Oxford in particular holding back the
spread of adult education to the working class in order to protect ‘the
over-crowded professions’. The narrator’s volte-face sets the future
pattern. He may condemn Jude sometimes but elsewhere, for
instance in Jude’s speech to the crowd at Christminster, he will
support his attempt to ‘reshape’ his course and rise into another
class. The very title of the novel (in its 
final form) is a protest not at
Jude’s exclusion from the university nor at his thwarted scholarship
but at his social failure. The odd emphasis thrown on the adjective by
the archaic phrasing suggests that, for some self-evident reason, he
ought not to have remained in the ‘obscurity’ of the working class.
2
A. J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don (Oxford, 
), –.
3
S. Marriott, A Backstairs to a Degree (Leeds, 
), ff.