Shortly after passing the big, grand Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, said to be Britain's first public museum, we entered our target area, the Jericho district of Oxford, an important place for me.
The first small houses we saw reminded me of the kind of cramped dwelling-place(s) that Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead, with their out-of-wedlock small children, and Father Time (Jude's son from his marriage to Arabella Donn) must've lived in:
Thomas Hardy's full-blown tragedy, Jude the Obscure, this is what had brought us into the Jericho district of Oxford.
Other buildings were ornate:
And others strange:
We passed the Oxford University Press building:
And a beautiful church building:
Which now functioned as some kind of upmarket bar that refused payment by cash, and didn't serve beer on tap.
To our relief, this church building wasn't that of St. Barnabas.
It'd once been St. Paul's, a budding popular Anglican high church, not far from
St. Barnabas, the high church that we sought.
St. Barnabas is commonly thought to be the model for the high church that Sue Bridehead attends before embarking on her outside marriage relationship with her cousin, Jude Fawley, in Jude the Obscure.
Not long after, we found ourselves being signposted towards St. Barnabas church:
And getting ever closer, some more small-looking houses reminded me of the place(s) that Jude and Sue, their tragically ill-fated, young children, and the melancholic-sinister Father Time must've lived in:
The Father Time-small children hanging scene in Jude the Obscure is the most shocking and harrowing episode that I've ever encountered in Literature, can still recall how my heart painfully jumped when encountering it many years ago, as a late teenager in the mid-1980s.
Eventually, we turned a corner, and the tower of the church of St. Barnabas stared us in the eyes:
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