Plot
The action is set in England in the late 19th century. Jude Fawley (Robert Powell) is a young stonemason’s apprentice living in the village of Marygreen with his Aunt Drusilla. His former schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson (John Franklyn-Robbins) leaves the village to take up a college appointment in Christminster, a university city based on Oxford. Jude has the ambition to study at Christminster and become a clergyman and is learning Greek and Latin. Meanwhile, he is seduced by Arabella Donn (Alex Marshall), a pig-keeper’s daughter, whom he marries when she claims to be pregnant. Arabella leaves him and emigrates to Australia. Jude then completes his apprenticeship and moves to Christminster, where he works as a mason, hoping to enter the university, but he is turned down for admission by the dean of Cardinal College. He meets and falls in love with his cousin, Sue Bridehead (Fiona Walker), but she marries Phillotson. However, Phillotson later allows Sue to live with Jude.
Arabella returns, and Jude divorces her, and Sue also gets a divorce from Phillotson. But Arabella has brought with her a son of Jude's, born after she left him, and sends Young Jude to live with his father. Jude and Sue have two small children of their own and are expecting a third, but are being ostracised for living together unmarried. Jude is sacked, and the family moves from town to town in search of work. Young Jude believes the children are the source of these troubles, murders Sue's two children, and hangs himself, leaving a suicide note. Sue then has a miscarriage. She comes to believe she is being punished by God for leaving her husband, so she returns to him. Jude, heartbroken, remarries Arabella, but he makes a final visit to Sue in freezing weather, is taken ill, and dies, aged only thirty. Sue is left to an unhappy life with Phillotson.
Reception
The serial was first broadcast in Britain on BBC Two between 6 February and 13 March 1971, in six 45-minute episodes, and then in the US on Masterpiece Theatre from 3 October to 7 November 1971. [1] In Britain, it appeared on Saturday evenings from 9:35 to 10:20 p.m., thus timed to be kept away from younger children. [3] The production was well received in Britain and the US and according to one critic "helped promulgate the British miniseries on PBS". [4]
One reviewer described the serial as a dark production and especially pertinent in the context of recent reforms to divorce law. [5]
John Leonard, writing in Life magazine as "Cyclops", noted "a surprising amount of sex, lots of bells, and bad weather". He considered that “an absorbing if not enthralling several hours of drama ... falls completely apart into silliness”, and that Alex Marshall as Arabella "steals the series". [6]
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy, which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. It is Hardy's last completed novel. The protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man; he is a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.
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The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character is an 1886 novel by the English author Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy's Wessex novels, it is set in a fictional rural England with Casterbridge standing in for Dorchester in Dorset where the author spent his youth. It was first published as a weekly serialisation from January 1886.
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Gwyneth Powell is an English actress who is best known for her portrayal of headmistress Bridget McCluskey in the BBC television series Grange Hill for eleven series between 1981 and 1991.
Delia Phyllis Daphne Heard was an English actress and acting teacher. She was born in Plymouth, Devon. She was perhaps best known in latter years as Richard's elderly mother Mrs. Polouvicka in To the Manor Born.
Fawley or North Fawley is a village and civil parish in West Berkshire, England. The hub of the village is centred 3.5 miles (5.6 km) east of Lambourn and has a sub-community within its bounds, Little or South Fawley. It includes the depopulated small hill settlement of Whatcombe. Fawley is the inspiration for "Marygreen" in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.
Fiona Walker is an English actress, known for numerous theatre and television roles between the 1960s and 1990s.
Tryphena Sparks, born in Puddletown, Dorset, the youngest child of James and Maria Sparks, was Thomas Hardy's cousin and possible lover, when she was 16 and he was 26. Hardy's mother suggested that Tryphena was not actually his cousin but his niece and he was thus prevented from marrying her. There are also suggestions that she had Hardy's child, a son called Randolph. The relationship ended when Hardy became engaged to Emma Gifford. She is considered by John Fowles an "important figure in both his emotional and imaginative life" and author Nicholas Hillyard considers that the affair is important in relation to Hardy's start as a novelist and poet.
Great Expectations is a British-American television serial based on Charles Dickens' 1861 novel of the same title. The serial was first broadcast in the US in three parts on The Disney Channel in 1989, and in the UK in six parts on the ITV network in 1991.
John Franklyn-Robbins was an English character and voice actor.
Mother Love is a 1989 BBC British television drama. It was adapted by Andrew Davies from Domini Taylor's 1983 novel concerning a mother's obsessive love for her son, vengeful hatred of his father, her ex-husband, and the effect on her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. It starred Diana Rigg, David McCallum, James Wilby, and Fiona Gillies, and was directed by Simon Langton.
Robert Woodrow Langbaum was an American author. He was University of Virginia James Branch Cabell professor of English and American literature (1967–99) and professor emeritus from 1999.
Arabella is a female given name, possibly of Greek, Latin, or Celtic origin.
Alex Marshall is an English actress and director, who was most active from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Morning Story is a British film made by BBC Television in 1969 and first broadcast in January 1970, directed by Gareth Davies and starring Lee Montague.
