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Very shortly after the golden age of the Modernist City Novel – Petersburg (1913), Ulysses (1922), Manhattan Transfer and Mrs Dalloway (1925), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) – a work of comparable stylistic brilliance and originality was published by an Australian writing about an Australian city. Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney was in fact finished as early as 1930, but the London publisher who accepted it early in 1931 insisted that she write a more conventional book before he would finally risk publication in 1934 (Rowley 137ff).

This chapter approaches Jude the Obscure as an ironic text, and attempts to show how some of the major ironies in the novel might be illuminated by drawing upon a cluster of now fairly familiar ideas of Walter Benjamin’s, which have not, however, been widely used in Hardy criticism. The particular concepts employed here are drawn from three texts: ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), and The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928). These three texts are taken up one by one to form a three-part examination of story, history, and allegory in Jude the Obscure. These are seen here as discernible and indeed critical discursive issues, implicitly linked within the novel, that can perhaps be thrown into sharper relief with the aid of the Benjamin perspective than has been hitherto achieved.

‘October 4, 185-. No. 9. A male child; newly born; weakly and very small; ticket round the neck with the name of Gustave; coarse linen; red stain on the left shoulder; no other mark.’ This is how Dudley Costello, at the end of his impressive Household Words article ‘Blank Babies in Paris’ (HW, VIII, 379–82; 17 December 1853), translates the registry entry for a new arrival at the Foundling Hospital in Paris in the Rue d’Enfer. Costello, responding to Dickens’s editorial policy of ‘dwelling on the romantic side of familiar things’, is able to wring metaphor and symbol from his subject. He starts by interrogating the etymology of that street name: it comes from Via Inferior, but ‘a poetical imagination soon made the corruption’ that ensures that infant orphans in Paris are brought up in the street of hell. The building on that street may be strikingly plain and anonymous (‘it lay before us, grey, blank, and dreary, with nothing to relieve the monotony of its general aspect…’), but the writer is able to imagine its very absence of significant features as pregnant with significance, for it is a place ‘where no witness might see the trembling mother deposit her new-born child.’