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"I Ought Not To Be Born, Ought I?" Said The Boy"
William Hatherell
September 1895
17.3 x 12 cm
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, XCI, p. 601 [see p. 572]
Illustration for Thomas Hardy's Hearts Insurgent afterwards Jude the Obscure
Scanned image, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham
Reproduced courtesy of Dorset County Council Library Service
The plate accompanying the tenth instalment (September 1895) of Hearts Insurgent in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, telegraphs this textual moment:
In the company of the boy she [Sue] wandered into this street and into that; but though she tried a dozen different houses she fared far worse alone than she had fared in Jude's company, and could get nobody to promise her a room for the following day. Every householder looked askance at such a woman and child inquiring for accommodation in the gloom. "I ought not to be born, ought I?" said the boy with misgiving. [VI, 1; p. 332]
The story's plot now turns on the feelings and actions of "Father Time" Fawley, Jude's son by Arabella, represented here for the second and final time. As the instigator of the story's catastrophe, the boy cannot remain an undeveloped character, but only in a single argument with Sue over her pregnancy do we fully begin to apprehend his motivations for killing himself and the other children.
Here the serial (Hearts Insurgent) and volume forms of Hardy's novel we now call Jude the Obscure part company, for in the former Jude and Sue do not have any children of their own, whereas the November 1895 volume edition more plausibly depicts a pregnant Sue whose condition affronts the pious matrons who clean the church at which Jude and Sue are in the process of restoring the faded table of the Ten Commandments. By the time Arabella encounters the couple three years later at the Kennetbridge spring fair in the novel, Sue has two children and is again expecting; in the serial, Sue, having adopted a child "whose parents died, and left him at the mercy of the world" (Ch. 40), lives "near" rather than with Jude, and the couple are still unmarried. Dennis Taylor comments in his notes to Ch. 40 (Part Five, Chapter 7 in the volume) in the Penguin edition: "The serial gets more and more strained in its struggle to maintain propriety, with its story of two cousins with adopted children. The result is to make the townspeople even more unreasonable in objecting to Jude and Sue" (p. 452).
In the serial, Sue's pregnancy is not mentioned, and Father Time has only a single sibling (mentioned several times, but never even described)--the adopted child--to eliminate. Although the plot the serial version of Hardy's 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge is more sensational than that of its volume version, such is not the case with Jude the Obscure, whose September 1895 instalment involves the deaths of only two children, neither of whom he can allow to be Sue and Jude's biological progeny if their relationship is to remain "pure." Despite Hardy's self-bowdlerization of this story in order to render the couple's common-law relationship more acceptable for magazine readers (whose sensibilities he had been made aware of by Cornhill editor Leslie Stephen over twenty years earlier), the illustration for the September instalment is valid in the plot of the novel as modern readers experience it.
Having received notice at the "respectable" lodgings that Jude has rented for them, Sue and Father Time wander the side streets of Christminster on Remembrance Day or Encaenia (the university's occasion for the giving of prizes and the conferring of honourary degrees), looking for fresh accommodations before informing Jude of how shabbily they've been treated by the landlady's husband:
"Every householder looked askance at such a woman and child inquiring for accommodation in the gloom.
'I ought not to be born, ought I?' said the boy with misgiving." [end of Ch. 42 in the serial]
Ironically, Hatherell's Sue and a particularly diminutive Father Time are quite respectably attired (he is even shown in school uniform) as a landlandy peers at them from behind the security of her door and a shopkeeper shuts up for the night. Sue is distraught, downcast, as she claps her closed umbrella (not mentioned in the text), but Time seems curious rather than upset. There is no glimpse of a college spire or mediaeval arch to suggest the specific location; although convincingly realized, the cobblestone street, whitewashed walls, and bow window of the shopfront might be anywhere in Hardy's Wessex.
As early as Chapter 39, Sue herself expresses the conviction that she and Jude are social outcasts and don't belong; in the church they are refurbishing, just after the contractor has yielded to public pressure and laid them off, she has misgivings about the propriety of her conduct: "I ought not — to have come!'" This pessimistic, self-accusatory tone has inevitably infected the consciousness of the boy. To her credit, Sue later realizes how she influenced him, intensifying his depression to suicidal proportions through her unguarded pessimism and tendency to talk to Time as if he were another adult rather than just a child. The plate, then, represents the clearest foreshadowing of the book's sensational murder-suicide, which occurs in the next chapter. Hatherell initially alerts the serial reader to the boy's unstable state of mind without revealing the catastrophe this monthly number contains. Since Hardy shows Sue in her usual "coloured clothing" (Ch. 43) as, re-enacting the scene at Ophelia's grave in Hamlet, she stands in the children's grave, Hatherell may have depicted her in dark clothing to render her more respectable as well as to underscore the growing inner gloom of the boy and his step-mother.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.
Last modified 16 February 2003