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about overpopulation (p. 345). Hardy’s novel is palpably that strangest of things within the tradition of the English novel, a novel of ideas—Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Malthus, and several others circulate in its pages, offering to the English tradition a Continental openness to fictional philosophizing.

    One of the qualities of Jude the Obscure that is hard to fix, but which is nevertheless palpable in reading it, is the sense that it is written at a moment experienced as “late in time.” That Jude was, at the time it was written, an end-of-the-century production is evident from both its publication date of 1895 and the millennialism that haunts its pages. The sensation that everything is about to change because the century is about to turn over is a sensation with which we should be able to empathize. Our own issues about the change from the twentieth to the twenty-first century were routed through anxieties about a computer bug (Y2K) that was rumored would cause systemic chaos and anarchy throughout the modern world. Hardy’s novel likewise reflects an anxious millennialism: a culture in which order as they knew it was in eopardy. Sue’s disenchantment with marriage makes her see in a bride leaving the church the “heifers of sacrifice in old times” (p. 293), while Little Father Time looks at a bunch of flowers and does not see beauty, but rather their imminent death (p. 303). Jude’s appraisal that their ideas were fifty years premature reflects his awareness that the fin de siècle had not brought change quickly enough for his own happiness. In general, however, Jude is rarely so self-conscious, instead reflecting Hardy’s sense that a momentous change is upon them as the century turns; Jude says: “I am in a chaos of principles—groping in the dark—acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am” (p. 335). We might think profitably of Hardy’s Russian contemporary Anton Chekhov, whose character Vershinin, in act 2 of the play Three Sisters (1901), expresses a compatible sentiment:
    “Well, you know, how shall I put it? I think everything is bound to change gradually—in fact, it’s changing before our very eyes. In two or three hundred years, or maybe in a thousand years—it doesn’t matter how long exactly—life will be different. It will be happy. Of course, we shan’t be able to enjoy that future life, but all the same, what we’re living for now is to create it, we work and ... yes, we suffer in order to create it” ( Plays, translated by Elisaveta Fen).
    The modern moment in which Hardy is writing indirectly produces one of the text’s most difficult questions: What kind of person is created by modernity? The novel answers it in a number of different ways, though most powerfully in its creation of the characters of Little Father Time, Sue Bridehead, and Jude Fawley. When Jude decides to give up working as a restorer of churches because his un-sanctified union with Sue has led them to be ostracized, Sue advises him to find work as a stonemason on “railway stations, bridges, theatres, music-halls, hotels—everything that has no connection with conduct” (p. 312). Note the following about Sue’s seemingly random list: railways and hotels are places of transience, theatres and music halls are places of performance, while a bridge also implies a place of transition from one place to another. The novel invites us to think about the kind of person formed by these social facts. What kind of person is more comfortable with railway stations and hotels than with Gothic churches? Hardy’s novel implies, though typically never states, that this would be a modern person who is suffering, as Chekhov suggested, to create the modern world.
    The most negative version of modernity in Jude the Obscure is the uncanny Little Father Time;