At a particularly low moment in Thomas Hardy’s bitter, furious novel “Jude the Obscure” (1895), the narrator reflects on young Jude’s friendless isolation. “Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him … But nobody did come, because nobody does.” This uncompromising pessimism, as many have pointed out, is an ungenerous view of life, or at least of Hardy’s life. While his origins were as obscure as Jude’s — his father was a builder in rural Dorset, his mother a cook in domestic service — his rise was steady, and he did not lack for friends or mentors.