The history of this novel (whose birth in its present shape has been much
retarded by the necessities of periodical publication) is briefly as follows.
The scheme was jotted down in 1890, from notes made in 1887 and onward, some of
the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman in the former year.
The scenes were revisited in October, 1892; the narrative was written in
outline in 1892 and the spring of 1893, and at full length, as it now appears,
from August, 1893, onward into the next year; the whole, with the exception of
a few chapters, being in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. It was
begun as a serial story in HARPER’S
MAGAZINE at the end of November, 1894, and was continued in
monthly parts.
But, as in the case of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the magazine
version was, for various reasons, abridged and modified in some degree, the
present edition being the first in which the whole appears as originally
written. And in the difficulty of coming to an early decision in the matter of
a title, the tale was issued under a provisional name—two such titles
having, in fact, been successively adopted. The present and final title, deemed
on the whole the best, was one of the earliest thought of.
For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age, which attempts to
deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may
press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity, and to point,
without a mincing of words, the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not aware
that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken.
Like former productions of this pen, Jude the Obscure is simply an
endeavor to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal
impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their
permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first moment.
T.H.
August, 1895.
