Thomas Hardy invented, based heavily on his home county of Dorset, in southeastern England. Hardy describes Wessex as a "partly real, partly dream country"—a place that we'd like to visit, maybe, except that Hardy makes so many awful things happen there.)
Young Jude Fawley stands watching as his schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, leaves Marygreen and heads to the glorious city of Christminster. There, Phillotson plans to go to university to become a great scholar. Jude decides, hey, I want that, too!, and commits himself to one day becoming a scholar just like the man he looks up to. (BTW, like Wessex, Christminster does not technically exist. But it's based on Oxford, the famous English university town.)
Okay, so maybe we don't all spend years and years dreaming about going to a specific college, but we all have dreams for the future, right? Maybe you've spent every day shooting jumpers in the hopes of being the next Lebron James or you've converted your garage into the perfect spot for your band to rock weekly, so one day you can take over the world and play Madison Square Garden. Whatever your greatest hopes and dreams are, that's Christminster for Jude.
As Jude ages, he gets his hands on the classics and Latin and Greek grammar books, and starts to teach himself. Yes, he's that hardcore. He just sits down and starts to teach himself Ancient Greek and Latin. He also gazes off into the distance in the direction of Christminster, knowing that someday he will go there to learn properly.
Unfortunately, when Jude is in his late teens, he runs into Arabella Donn. If only Jude was as intuitive as that guy on The Mentalist—then maybe he would have run from Arabella while he had the chance. Sadly, Jude's not a psychic. He's just an ordinary guy about to make a terrible mistake.
Jude starts courting Arabella in a casual way, but through a bit of seduction, Arabella convinces Jude to sleep with her. Of course, there's no actual sex within the action of the novel, since that really would not fly in 1896. Arabella then convinces Jude that she is pregnant (though, again, the word "pregnant" is never used, because—you guessed it—it's still 1896). Being an honorable young man, Jude gives up on his dreams of university life at Christminster and agrees to marry Arabella. Arabella reveals that she was mistaken about her condition, and Jude feels both tricked and trapped.
