Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

particularly in the pig’s-pizzle scene. A few other corrections suggest
that the alterations were Hardy’s own.
When in 
 Macmillan took over as Hardy’s publishers they
wished to stake their claim by a complete edition of his works. The
bang with which his career as a novelist ended had made him a 
fine
commercial proposition. However, in the 
 so-called Uniform
Edition Macmillan still used the Osgood McIlvaine plates for print-
ing, producing yet again what was basically the non-authorial punc-
tuation of the ‘First Edition’. Again, Hardy made changes, many
being bowdlerizings in the pig’s-pizzle throwing episode, as well as
some thirty other instances chie
fly involving early scenes with
Arabella.
It was not until 
, after an abortive attempt by Hardy to
arrange an ‘edition de luxe’ of all his works with an American
publisher, that Macmillan prepared a thoroughly revised ‘de
finitive’
version of all his work, the ‘Wessex Edition’. Using a copy of the
Uniform Edition of Jude, Hardy revised onto it to make printer’s
copy; he also revised and up-dated his preface. As with the earlier
editions Hardy read proofs carefully. Again he accepted the now
fossilized punctuation, but made alterations and revisions number-
ing more than two hundred. Some of them were stylistic, but many
were part of the process of authorial rethinking which had been
going on since Hardy began to write the manuscript. Several relate
to Sue, and whereas the First Edition had diminished her simplicity
and warmth, these complicate her further by adding suggestions of
stronger feeling: she and Jude now kiss ‘long and close’; she admits
to ‘not disliking’ his kissing her (earlier she had not disliked it ‘very
much’); and she confesses to Jude ‘I do love you’ (see note to p. 
).
Her motives become less, not more clear, and she becomes more
‘elusive’.
Further, as the American publishers who had been interested in the
de luxe edition ceased to be involved before its publication, Harpers
now negotiated for the American rights of the Wessex Edition.
For copyrighted novels, including Jude, they acquired the sheets
from Macmillan. Hardy appears to have proof-read some of this so-
called Autograph Edition. The Jude text shows about 
fifty differ-
ences from the Wessex Edition, some, such as those reverting to an
Note on the Text
xxiv

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earlier reading, clearly Hardy’s. The Autograph Edition therefore
has some authority and use has been made of it.
Even after this, the last revised edition before his death in 
,
Hardy continued to make one or two emendations, though only
minor ones, on his own volumes of the Wessex Edition. These were
marked in to two of Hardy’s own copies of Jude (one in the Dorset
County Museum, the other in the Adams collection). Typically he
was still rewriting even thirty years after he began to create the
novel. Again, these emendations have been made on the basis of
these corrections.
The present edition presents the text of the 
 volume with
emendations both from the manuscript and from later editions,
based on a knowledge of textual transmission, where error or author-
ial alteration can be inferred. It adopts, like the Clarendon editions
of The Woodlanders and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the punctuation of
the manuscript, with its sparing use of commas, precision with
colons, and its avoidance of the ubiquitous exclamation marks that
lend an over-emphatic rhetorical quality to much of the dialogue in
the 
 edition. For missing pages the punctuation of the First
Edition is accepted.
The alterations to punctuation that Hardy made during the his-
tory of the text are not accepted, since they are alterations of the
system as others left it, not as he originally made it.
Variants cited in the Notes are selective. A primary aim is to make
clear the di
fferences in the manuscript written in – and the
final revised version of ––where these are of literary interest.