Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Jude the Obscure
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The opening of the novel
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher’s effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the enthusiasm having waned he had never acquired any skill in playing, and the purchased article had been a perpetual trouble to him ever since in moving house.
The rector had gone away for the day, being a man who disliked the sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the new schoolteacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything would be smooth again.
The blacksmith, the farm bailiff, and the schoolmaster himself were standing in perplexed attitudes in the parlour before the instrument. The master had remarked that even if he got it into the cart he should not know what to do with it on his arrival at Christminster, the city he was bound for, since he was only going into temporary lodgings just at first.
It begins with a schoolmaster’s departure and a piano nobody can move, in the novel’s opening paragraphs:
Download Full EPUB1895
~145,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 8.1 hours
Standalone
Wessex, from Marygreen to Christminster and back, in the 1860s to 1890s
Fifty-three chapters in six parts; the guide reads them as twelve movements
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0.73 MB (EPUB) · 0.86 MB (AZW3) · 0.78 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Standard Ebooks · Project Gutenberg #153
Jude Fawley is eleven when the schoolmaster leaves Marygreen for Christminster, and the boy decides that he will follow him to the city of light. He is a stonemason’s orphan brought up by a great-aunt who keeps a bakery; he teaches himself Greek and Latin from second-hand grammars bought off a quack, and when his apprenticeship ends he takes his tools to Christminster and writes to the heads of the colleges. One of them answers. The answer tells him that a working man will do better to remain in his sphere and stick to his trade, and Jude chalks a verse from Job on the college wall at night. Around him the novel arranges three marriages and one long refusal. Arabella Donn, a pig-breeder’s daughter, draws him into a wedding that rests on a lie; Sue Bridehead, his cousin, marries the schoolmaster Phillotson out of a scruple and leaves him for Jude without marrying him; and the pair who believe that love needs no register discover what the world does with people who live as they do. Hardy called the book a tragedy of unfulfilled aims, and its last movement is the darkest thing in Victorian fiction.
Hardy wrote the novel in outline in 1892 and at full length from the summer of 1893, after the reception of Tess of the d’Urbervilles had already shown him what a Wessex novel about sexual honesty could expect. It appeared in 1895, was denounced from pulpits and in the reviews, and the experience cured him of any further interest in novel-writing; the rest of his career belongs to poetry. Jude the Obscure has since become the book people quote when they argue about class and marriage in English fiction, and its Wessex can still be walked between Marygreen and Christminster. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #153 and Standard Ebooks.
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of Jude the Obscure: what happens in its fifty-three chapters, who the six central figures are, which laws and institutions the plot is built on, and why a book published in 1895 still reads like an argument with the present. The setting is Wessex between the 1860s and the 1890s, from the hamlet of Marygreen to the university city of Christminster, with Melchester, Shaston and Aldbrickham in between.
Jude Fawley, an orphan stonemason raised by his great-aunt at Marygreen, is fixed at eleven by the departure of his schoolmaster Richard Phillotson for Christminster, and spends the next twenty years trying to get there. He teaches himself the classical languages, is apprenticed to a mason, and is deflected into marriage by Arabella Donn, who tells him she is pregnant. When the apprenticeship ends he goes to Christminster, is refused by the colleges, meets his cousin Sue Bridehead, and watches her marry Phillotson out of a religious scruple. The pair come together at last without a ceremony, are destroyed by the need to appear respectable, and end in a Christminster that has never had a place for either of them. The last part of the book brings him back to the city as a married man with a family, which is where the novel’s argument reaches its limit and where the children arrive.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born in a thatched cottage at Higher Bockhampton in Dorset, trained as an architect in London, and published his first novel in 1871. By the 1890s he was the most discussed novelist in England and a poet in waiting; Thomas Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure as his last novel, and the hostility it met decided the question he had been circling for years, which was whether fiction was worth the trouble. His Wessex is a real map with invented names, and the colleges, schools, inns and roads of this book can be traced in Oxford, Salisbury, Shaftesbury and the villages of the Frome.
Read beside Far from the Madding Crowd, where the same farms are still governed by a providence that means well, Jude looks like the ledger of what Hardy had learned in between: that the countryside is not a moral order but an economy, and that the people who believe in its promises are the ones it breaks. The Return of the Native had already shown how a homecoming can be a sentence, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles had already shown a woman destroyed by a code she never agreed to. Jude adds the man’s side of that destruction and the workingman’s side of the university.
The text used here follows the Standard Ebooks edition, which is based on Project Gutenberg #153 and collated against scans of the 1895 Osgood, McIlvaine first edition. Both the 1895 preface and the 1912 postscript are included, which matters for this novel more than for most: the postscript is where Hardy answers his critics, names the marriage laws as the machinery of the tale, and explains what the scandal did to his career.
Historical Context
The plot turns on the law as it stood after the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. A divorce was no longer a private Act of Parliament but the business of a court, and the grounds were unequal: a husband could petition on adultery alone, while a wife had to prove adultery and something further, such as cruelty, desertion or bigamy. Until 1878 a woman had no separate protection against a violent husband, and even then the separation was not a divorce. Jude can be divorced by Arabella because she wants him to be free, and Sue can be divorced by Phillotson because he agrees to supply evidence of an adultery that never happened. The most respectable character in the book commits perjury to end a marriage, and the least respectable exploits the same law to begin one. Hardy’s own view, stated in the postscript, is that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either party.
Christminster is Oxford, and the exclusion at its centre is not a rule printed anywhere. The old universities were open in law to any man who could pay the fees, and the religious tests that had kept Dissenters out were abolished in 1871; what kept Jude out was the cost of three years in residence, the Latin and Greek a grammar school would have supplied, and the assumption, put politely in the Master’s letter, that a working man belongs to his trade. Hardy’s postscript notes that when Ruskin College was founded in Oxford at the end of the century it ought to have been called the College of Jude the Obscure, and the remark is the shortest account of what the novel is about.
The book appeared in November 1895, and the storm was immediate. Reviewers who had learned to tolerate Tess found Jude unbearable, one of them rechristening it Jude the Obscene, and a bishop is said to have thrown his copy into the fire. Hardy, who had already been ill, took the attack personally and stopped writing fiction. The postscript of 1912 answers the charge that the book is immoral by pointing out that the parts the reviewers seized on were some twenty or thirty pages of necessary detail, while the shattered ideals of the two chief characters, which interested him, went unread. The reversal came slowly and then completely: the novel that Victorians called a scandal is now the book in which the Victorian novel is generally thought to have ended.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Jude Fawley: A stonemason, orphaned early, raised at Marygreen by his great-aunt Drusilla. He learns Latin and Greek by himself, carves the stone of the colleges he cannot enter, and is patient in a way that the world reads as weakness. His trade is genuine and his scholarship is genuine; the tragedy is that neither is any use to him in the place where they would count, and Hardy gives him no gift for self-assertion, which is why the letter and the chalk are the only weapons he ever uses.
- Sue Bridehead: Jude’s cousin, trained as a pupil-teacher at Melchester, High Church in her observances and sceptical in her temperament. She marries Phillotson because she believes she owes him something, leaves him because she cannot bear the pretence, and then cannot marry Jude because she has come to believe the ceremony is what makes a thing real. She is the book’s most modern person and its most superstitious, and Hardy does not resolve the contradiction; her intelligence is real and so is her fear.
- Arabella Donn: A pig-breeder’s daughter from Alfredston, practical, cheerful, entirely unsentimental, and the survivor of the story. She catches Jude with a false pregnancy, leaves him for Australia, comes back married to an innkeeper called Cartlett, and takes Jude back when he is dying. Hardy gives her no illusions and no malice, only appetite and a very clear head about money; her second marriage is the only one in the novel that works.
- Richard Phillotson: The schoolmaster whose departure opens the novel. He is decent, pedantic, about twenty years older than Sue, and sincerely fond of her; he tries to give her the freedom she asks for and loses his school when the managers hear of it. He is the only man in the book who tries to be just at his own expense, and he ends by marrying Sue again, which is either forgiveness or surrender.
- Little Father Time: Jude’s son by Arabella, brought up in Australia and sent to him when the boy is old enough to be in the way. He is small for his age, speaks like an old man, and has a settled conviction that his parents would be happier without children. His nickname comes from the careworn face, and his note, left on the floor, is the shortest and most terrible sentence in the novel.
- Widow Edlin: The Fawleys’ neighbour at Marygreen, a widow of fifty-five years’ standing, who nurses Jude’s great-aunt and stands at the edge of every wedding and funeral in the book. She is the choric voice of the older Wessex, sceptical about marriage as a system and entirely without illusions about men, and her remark at the last wedding closes the novel with more judgment than any sermon in it.
Core Literary Themes
- Class and the closed door: The refusal by the colleges is not one scene but a structure. Jude is kept out of Christminster by money, schooling and manners, and the novel shows the same door shutting in the school, the shop and the lodging house. The Master’s letter is polite because the exclusion is not supposed to be a law, and the chalk verse on the wall is the only protest that the book allows, made at night, by a man with a piece of chalk in his pocket. Hardy, who left school at sixteen, knew the door from both sides.
- Marriage as legal machinery: Three weddings, one divorce case, one registrar’s office and a great deal of argument about the sacrament. Hardy puts the case for and against in the mouths of his characters and lets the law do the damage; the deepest irony is Sue’s, that freedom obtained on false evidence is not freedom, and that the ceremony she despises turns out to be the only thing she can believe in.
- Flesh and spirit: The preface names a deadly war between flesh and spirit, and the novel keeps the two in the same body. Jude’s sensuality is not punished as sin but as biology; Sue’s chastity is not praised as virtue but diagnosed as fear. Hardy’s point is that the war is fought over people who did not choose it, and that the victors are the ones who can afford to be respectable. Sue’s phrase for it is that they are a weak, tremulous pair; Jude’s is simply that he cannot help himself.
- The New Woman and the old village: Sue is Hardy’s portrait of the woman of the feminist movement as a German critic described her to him: slight, pale, intellectual, city-bred, refusing to treat marriage as a profession. Set against Arabella, who has no theory but plenty of practice, she looks less like progress than like a new kind of unhappiness. The novel does not settle the argument, and that is part of its honesty.
- Inheritance and the family curse: The Fawleys are said to be unlucky in marriage, and the great-aunt’s warning not to marry is the first thing the reader hears about the family. Hardy uses the notion of a curse without ever asking the reader to believe in it: what descends from parent to child is poverty, bad luck and a temperament, and Little Father Time is the proof that the descent is real.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Jude the Obscure?
Hardy’s text is in the public domain, and a clean copy of it is not hard to find. Project Gutenberg #153 has carried the novel since the 1990s, and it is the source of most of the digital Judes now in circulation, including the one on this page.
What this page adds is the apparatus around the text: twelve grouped chapter summaries that follow the six parts without losing the shape of the plot, six character notes, five themes, the laws and institutions behind the action, and eight questions that the novel usually provokes, from the university refusal to the children. The reading order runs from the opening chapter to the last page without assuming that you have finished the book; nothing here requires it, though the last two groups give away the ending.
The files themselves are made for readers rather than for archives. Each format is a single download, without DRM, without registration and without a reader app that wants an account; the EPUB will open in anything from Calibre to a phone, and the KEPUB is built for Kobo’s own typography.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text was set from Project Gutenberg #153 and proofed against scans of the 1895 first edition; the preface and the 1912 postscript are both included, and the chapter divisions follow Hardy’s own parts rather than a modern editor’s.
- Chapter summaries in twelve movements The fifty-three chapters are grouped by part and by the phases of the plot, so the guide can be read straight through as a plot in itself or consulted one part at a time before or after the chapters it covers.
- Characters and themes indexed Six central figures and five themes are described in their own right, with the marriage law and the university question set out in the historical notes, so that the arguments in the book have somewhere to stand.
- No DRM, one tap, three formats EPUB for most readers, AZW3 for Kindle, KEPUB for Kobo: the same text in each, without a lock, an email address or a checkout step between the link and the file.
- Far from the Madding Crowd — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Return of the Native — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel has fifty-three chapters in six parts, each part named for the place where it happens. The guide below keeps Hardy’s parts and divides each one where the story changes gear, which gives twelve groups; the labels are editorial, the events are the novel’s own.
- Marygreen: Part I opens with Phillotson’s cart and the piano he cannot take to Christminster, and with Jude, eleven years old, suggesting his great-aunt’s fuel-house as a store. The boy is beaten for letting Farmer Troutham’s birds feed, walks to the ridge to see the city of light, and is sold a Latin grammar and a Greek one by the quack Vilbert on the promise of a love-philtre. Then the bread cart, the apprenticeship at Alfredston, and a great-aunt’s warning against marriage. The ambitions are deliberately ordinary, which is what makes the village’s amusement at them so cruel.
- Arabella and the pig: Jude meets Arabella Donn on the bridge, where she throws the characteristic part of a barrow-pig at him, and the village girls decide that he is to be had. A false pregnancy produces a wedding; the marriage produces a pig-killing in the snow, done by Jude himself when the butcher fails to come, and an argument about scalding and singeing that ends with his classics on the greasy floor. Arabella sails for Australia, and Jude, drunk, tries the pond before he decides on Christminster. Her family emigrate because the pig business is bad, which is the economic truth under all the talk of love.
- Christminster: Jude arrives at last and finds a city he has already visited in his head. He works as a mason on the colleges, hears the Latin of the Creed through a window, and meets Sue Bridehead behind the counter of an ecclesiastical furnisher, where a parcel of pagan casts and a High Church conscience cost her the job. He helps her towards the pupil-teacher post at Lumsdon, and the two of them discover how much they have in common and how little they can do about it. The city he imagined is a university; the city he finds is a building site, and he is on the scaffolding.
- The Master’s letter: Phillotson, settled at Lumsdon, is fond of Sue in a patient and unexciting way, and Jude delivers the letter that puts her in his school. Jude writes to the heads of the Christminster colleges and gets one answer, from the Master of Biblioll, advising a workingman to remain in his sphere and stick to his trade. That night he chalks a verse from Job on the college wall, and the next morning he laughs at himself, which is worse. The answer is courteous, reasonable and unanswerable, which is what makes it unbearable.
- The training school: Sue goes to the Melchester Training School, and Jude follows to be near her, working as a mason on the cathedral restoration. A day out ends with Sue locked out of the school after dark, and she is expelled, hides in Jude’s lodgings, and is sent away to a friend’s school near Shaston. The novel’s most ordinary happiness and its most ordinary fear occupy the same few weeks, and neither of them is allowed to last. Her expulsion is the first of the social punishments that the book administers with such regularity.
- Sue marries Phillotson: Phillotson proposes, Sue accepts out of gratitude and a sense of duty, and Jude spends the wedding day in Melchester, where the cathedral music reaches him from outside. Arabella reappears, married to an innkeeper called Cartlett, and the two marriages of Jude’s life are suddenly visible at once, one made on a lie and one made on a scruple. Jude goes back to his tools and to the church music that is the only pleasure left to him. The wedding is the most respectable event in the novel and the most dishonest.
- Shaston: Part IV moves to Shaston, the hill town where Phillotson has taken a larger school. Sue, married and miserable, asks her husband for a separate room, then for her freedom, and the arguments she makes are the arguments of a woman who has thought about the contract and cannot make herself believe in it. Jude comes when she writes; Phillotson, generous and humiliated, listens to his friend Gillingham and tries to decide what a just man owes a wife who does not love him. Her request for a separate room is the first practical step in a long argument about what a marriage is.
- The divorce: Phillotson gives Sue her liberty by supplying evidence of an adultery that has not happened, and the school managers ask for his resignation for condoning it. Sue goes to Jude, and the two of them begin the life that the rest of the book will test. The divorce case is reported, the neighbours draw their conclusions, and the novel shows how easily the law can be made to say something that is not true. The managers’ word for his decency is condoning her adultery, and the school is lost on the strength of it.
- Two divorces and a registrar: Jude divorces Arabella at her own request, Sue’s decree is made absolute, and the pair try to marry at a registrar’s office and discover that they cannot go through with it. They tell the world they were married in London, and the lie holds for a while, which is long enough to make them respectable and not long enough to make them safe. Sue’s scruple grows as their position becomes more precarious. A registrar’s office is the one place where a marriage can be entered without a church, and even there the pair cannot sign.
- Aldbrickham and elsewhere: The pair settle at Aldbrickham, where Jude works at his trade and Sue keeps a house that is not quite hers, and where Little Father Time arrives from Australia with his grandmother’s clothes and his old man’s face. The boy’s presence turns the household into a family that the law does not recognise, and the neighbours’ questions do the rest. Then the wandering years, the fairs, the lodgings, and Arabella at Kennetbridge with her innkeeper. The boy calls them father and mother, which is true, and the law calls them something else, which is also true.
- The children: The family returns to Christminster on Remembrance Day, and no landlady will take a couple with three children. They find two rooms in an old cottage under the wall of Sarcophagus College, and the boy, who has been told too often that children are a burden, does what he thinks is expected of him. Sue’s cry that they must conform is the hinge of the novel, and the note left on the floor is three words long. Hardy gives the tragedy no explanation, which is more than any of his critics could manage.
- The end at Christminster: Sue goes back to Phillotson, convinced that her punishment is to keep the sacrament she broke, and Jude is left with Arabella, who marries him again and nurses him without illusion. He walks to Marygreen in the rain to see Sue one last time, comes home ill, and dies in his lodgings while the Remembrance crowds shout by the river. Arabella goes to the boat race, and the Widow Edlin observes that weddings have become funerals. The university’s festival is going on while Jude dies, and nobody in the crowd knows his name.
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Part of: Classic Fiction · Victorian
