52 pages • 1-hour read
Jacob's Room
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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Chapter 1 Summary
With tears in her eyes, Betty Flanders writes to Captain Barfoot. She writes while sitting on a beach during her vacation in the southern English county of Cornwall. With Betty are her three sons: Archer, John, and Jacob. She is helped by the boys’ nanny, Rebecca. The letter, spanning several pages in a “horrid blot” (1), will be sent north to Scarborough, where Captain Barfoot is waiting for her to return. Nearby, Charles Steele practices his watercolor painting. His “exasperated” (2) efforts are interrupted by Archer, who wants to find his brother.
Jacob has clambered up onto a big rock. In a rockpool, he finds a crab and grabs it to place in his bucket. While doing so, however, he catches sight of a man and a woman laid down on the beach together. After a brief moment spent watching the couple, Jacob runs away. Beneath a tree, he finds the skull of a sheep. He wants to pick it up. Betty catches sight of Jacob and tells him to put the skull down. Jacob makes do with the jawbone, taking it home with him. Betty believes Jacob is a “handful” (5), even though he is still very young. As evening begins, Betty escorts Jacob and Archer to the home that the family has rented for the vacation. As they pass through the garden gate, however, Betty realizes that she did not purchase meat for dinner.
Later, Archer struggles to sleep due to a storm outside. He is kept awake by the mysterious sounds of the vacation house. Betty tries to comfort Archer while Rebecca takes care of baby John. Once the children have fallen asleep, Betty lights a lamp and sits quietly, listening to the storm. The jawbone is now laid at the end of Jacob’s bed, where the “profoundly unconscious” (8) Jacob lies asleep. Outside, the crab is still in the bucket as it fills gradually with rainwater.
Chapter 2 Summary
The relationship between Betty and Captain Barfoot is the subject of much gossip in the town of Scarborough, located in the north of England. Betty is regarded as a “widow in her prime” (9). She is still grieving for the death of Seabrook Flanders, her late husband. In the graveyard, his tombstone names him as a “merchant of this city” (10). Seabrook never really held such a job, at least not for very long, but Betty hopes that the inscription will inspire his sons.
The family lives in a house on the fringes of Scarborough. Betty struggles to raise all three boys by herself. With the children, she hikes to the top of Dods Hill. At the top of the hill are the ruins of an old Roman fort. As the boys play in the ruins, Betty lies down to rest. She feels weary as she gazes out over the sea. Studying the horizon, she thinks about the life she has spent in this small town. She is often struck by the thought of her late husband and his tombstone.
The Scarborough pier has an aquarium that is popular with visitors to the town. At the end of the pier, a band plays for a crowd. They people listen to the waltz, all with “the same blurred, drugged expression” (13). Sitting with Jacob’s clothes on her lap, Betty recalls the band as she repairs the holes. Returning home, the family pass by Mr. Floyd, a local priest. Mr. Floyd will teach Latin to the boys to prepare them for their schooling. He leaves behind a letter, in which he proposes marriage to Betty. This annoys Betty, especially as Mr. Floyd is not the only local man to ask for her hand in marriage. Writing as politely as she can, she refuses the proposal. The letter surprises Mr. Floyd, but he keeps it for many years almost like a treasure.
Years later, Mr. Floyd’s career has advanced. Meanwhile, Betty and the three boys are still in Scarborough. Archer, the eldest, joins the merchant navy. Jacob is sent to a reputable school. Jacob joins his younger brother John in catching bugs. They use a chemical to preserve the captured insects and the smell of the chemicals fills the house. They collect butterflies and moths; when looking at one moth, Jacob can still remember the night he caught it beside a fallen tree.
Each Wednesday, Captain Barfoot comes to their house. His wife is stuck inside their house due to an illness, but the Captain makes sure to dress as well as possible when he visits Betty and her boys. When he is not at home, he has hired a man named Mr. Dickens to take care of his wife, though she feels like a “prisoner” (19). He passes by the people of Scarborough and arrives at the Flanders house, as ever, right on time. When she opens the door, however, Rebecca tells the Captain that Betty has gone out. She expects Betty home soon, so he agrees to wait.
When she returns, a breathless Betty apologizes to Captain Barfoot. He listens to her talk about his possible career in local politics. Then, from his pocket, he produces a letter that confirms that Jacob has been awarded a place at Cambridge University. He will start in October 1906.
Chapter 3 Summary
Mrs. Norman is sitting in a cabin on a train to Cambridge. A stranger comes into the cabin and Mrs. Norman, who has come to believe that “men are dangerous” (25), studies the newcomer. As she examines the man’s appearance, she makes plans for how she might escape if he were to suddenly turn violent. At the same time, the newcomer seems indifferent to her. Mrs. Norman frets about how to compose herself. From her perspective, the man—a now 19-year-old Jacob—seems to be “nice, handsome, interesting, distinguished, well-built” (26). When the train stops, Jacob helps her to carry her luggage from the train to the platform.
The famous Cambridge University attracts many young men. During a church service, Jacob feels bored. Afterward, he is invited to eat Sunday lunch with other undergraduates. The lunch will be hosted by the Plumers. Mr. Plumer is a physics lecturer at the university. Jacob arrives late and the meal perturbs him. He finds the house to be “bloody beastly” (31). He says as much to Timmy Durrant, his friend and fellow student, as they ride a boat together. The boat ride along the river is a relaxing way to spend the afternoon. Durrant thinks about Jacob while eating cherries. The pair talks about their families, with Durrant particularly interested in learning about Uncle Morty, Jacob’s mysterious uncle who is said to have taken up Islam in his old age. The friends take the boat further upriver, past a “beastly” (33) crowd.
In the student halls, Jacob lives in a typical room. He has two chairs and a round table, littered with the standard student paraphernalia. He also has a few family mementos and reminders of home, as well as his scruffy slippers and collection of books.
As he grows old, Professor Huxtable struggles to get up and down the big staircases in the university. He has developed a familiar routine that involves spending many hours sitting in the same chair. Though Professor Sopwith is just as old, he is much more mobile. He welcomes students to his room, where they are invited to spend the evening eating and talking.
Jacob joins his friends to visit Simeon, where they eat dates and read together. They share jokes as they lounge lazily in their chairs. Late into the night, Jacob smokes a pipe as he gazes out over the grounds of the university. As the other students retire, Jacob and Simeon are left alone. They speak stiltedly about Julian the Apostate, a Roman Emperor. After saying goodnight to Simeon, Jacob crosses the grounds by himself and returns to his room.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Throughout Jacob’s Room, Woolf presents time as an elastic, malleable narrative tool. The cadence of the narration accelerates and decelerates, often between individual paragraphs, so that small, intimate scenes describing slight gestures or acts take up as much space as the passing of years or decades. For the narrator, time exists all at once, and narrative chronology is deployed at the service of the characters, rather than the plot.
This narrative handling of time is reflected in the environment, such as the scenes set atop Dods Hill. From the top of the hill, Betty sees the entire town of Scarborough. She sees the places and houses that have dictated the course of her life; she sees the graveyard where her husband is buried and the vast ocean that offers infinite possibilities for her son, Archer, who will join the merchant navy and follow in his father’s footsteps. Likewise, Betty sees the Aquarium and the Roman ruins, the future and the past colliding together at once. Time is “laid out like a flat puzzle” (11), with Betty, the narrator, and the audience now tasked with solving this puzzle by examining time as a cohesive whole rather than a linear progression of events.
Similarly, the narrator often rapidly expands the narrative beyond the immediate action. Mr. Floyd is Jacob’s Latin teacher and, after offering the young Jacob a gift, the narrator explains a future incident in which Mr. Floyd will recognize Jacob on the street. Jacob has grown into a “fine young man” (16), Mr. Floyd believes, but the narrative then returns to Jacob’s teenage years. Likewise, the kitten given to John grows suddenly “very old” (17), illustrating a subtle passing of time across the space of several paragraphs. The ebb and flow of narrative time imbues the novel with a sense of unease and unknowability. Nothing, not even time, is definitive. Instead, everything is subjective and dictated by experience and ineffability.
The narrative focus of the opening three chapters gradually shifts to Jacob, the protagonist. Chapters 1 and 2 are set during Jacob’s childhood, meaning that the focus is largely on his mother Betty and the environment in which Jacob was raised. Even in Chapter 3, when the focus does switch to Jacob, his first portrayal is from the perspective of another passenger on the train. To Mrs. Norman, Jacob is a “powerfully built young man” (25), distinguishing him from the occasionally disobedient child glimpsed from his mother’s perspective.
This means of switching narrative focus highlights The Ineffability of Individual Identity. The novel interrogates the question of Jacob’s character but illustrates the way in which even the protagonist of a novel remains ultimately unknowable. Jacob is not presented as an individual with his own identity, but as a composition of overlapping, subjective identities that can vary depending on who is observing him. The real, authentic Jacob is unreachable, even for the narrator and the audience. By denying the audience access to an objective understanding of the protagonist, Woolf defies literary expectation and speaks to the broader problems of the unknowability of the self and the alienation of the individual. Rather than a narrative device, this ineffability becomes the defining premise of Jacob’s Room.
Just as Jacob’s identity is presented as a composition of various subjective perspectives, the novel also creates a foundation for his character by exploring the social aspects of his background, introducing the theme of The Complexities of Education and Social Mobility. Jacob does not come from a wealthy family. Betty Flanders may be middle class enough to employ Rebecca to help with raising her children and she may be distantly related to members of the aristocracy, but her material position makes her existence precarious. She is a widow and she fears the prospect of raising three boys alone. Seabrook, her late husband, was a “little wild” (10); he was never rich, nor was his status very secure.
Betty relies on the help of those around her, so Jacob is taught Latin and prepared for school by a benevolent neighbor who is romantically interested in his mother. Betty is perturbed by Mr. Floyd’s romantic advances; she turns down his proposal, yet depends on him for her children’s future. She sees education as an engine of class mobility: Jacob must learn Latin so he can attend a better school; he must attend a better school so that he can be admitted to university; he must graduate from university to escape from the family’s precarious material situation.
Education thus becomes an accelerant of class mobility, yet Jacob’s experiences at Cambridge remind him of the division between social classes. His classmates are wealthier, more privileged, and more at home in the trappings of the upper classes than he is. Education, Jacob learns, is the key to mobility in the rigidly stratified British society, but also a stark reminder of the many ways in which he will never truly be at home in the world of the very wealthy. As much as he can use education to escape his youth, his adulthood will be spent on the periphery of an unknowable world.
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