The Final Blow — Jude the Obscure

Sue sits in a cramped room opposite the black walls of Sarcophagus College, understanding that Jude's dream has lodged them in a purlieu of gloom. Father Time, already brooding over eviction and Jude's absence, asks what they will do tomorrow. Sue answers that all is trouble. In a moment of candor she tells him she is pregnant again; the boy erupts, blaming her for bringing another mouth into misery.

The next morning Sue leaves the children to meet Jude at his inn. While she is gone, Father Time hangs himself and the two younger children, leaving a pencil note: 'Done because we are too menny.' Jude finds the bodies, the doctor calls it a new kind of child who sees life's terrors too young, and Sue blames her honest words. At the funeral she collapses at the grave demanding to see the coffins again. The trauma brings on a miscarriage of her unborn child. The chapter is the novel's catastrophic centre: love, poverty, and truth too heavy for a child to carry.

Hardy wrote this chapter in 1895, when childhood was just being recognised as a distinct phase of life requiring protection.

Little Jude's tragedy reflects Victorian anxieties about industrialization creating 'old' children who see too much, too young.