Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Acknowledgements
vi
General Editor’s Preface
vii
Map of Hardy’s Wessex
viii
Introduction
xi
Note on the Text
xxii
Select Bibliography
xxvi
A Chronology of Thomas Hardy
xxix
JUDE THE OBSCURE

Explanatory Notes


---

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
F
 generous help of many kinds I should like to thank: the British
Academy, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Penny Boumelha, Simon
Gatrell, the late Juliet Grindle, Sheila Parsons, Richard Little Purdy,
and Kathy Swift.
 

---

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
T
 first concern in the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Hardy’s
works has been with the texts. Individual editors have compared
every version of the novel or stories that Hardy might have revised,
and have noted variant readings in words, punctuation and styling in
each of these substantive texts; they have thus been able to exclude
much that their experience suggests that Hardy did not intend. In
some cases this is the 
first time that the novel has appeared in a
critical edition purged of errors and oversights; where possible
Hardy’s manuscript punctuation is used, rather than what his
compositors thought he should have written.
Some account of the editor’s discoveries will be found in the Note
on the Text in each volume, while the most interesting revisions
their work has revealed are included as an element of the Explana-
tory Notes. In some cases a Clarendon Press edition of the novel
provides a wealth of further material for the reader interested in the
way Hardy’s writing developed from manuscript to 
final collected
edition.
I should like to thank Shirley Tinkler for her help in drawing the
maps that accompany each volume.
 

---

---

---

This page intentionally left blank 

---

INTRODUCTION
A
 the crude irony of the first printed title, The Simpletons, its
lurid replacement Hearts Insurgent, and the weakly descriptive
suggestion The Recalcitrants, Jude the Obscure seems satisfactorily
precise and untheatrical. But its asymmetry has the e
ffect of over-
emphasizing the male protagonist; and the apparent protest at his
fate has drawn attention to the parallels with Hardy’s own life. Edi-
tors have felt documentation of the autobiographical element was
essential: Jude as Hardy, Sue as Mary Hardy–Emma Gi
fford–
Florence Henniker all in one, and many details to be spelled out,
even if they do not include a 
fictitious son by his cousin Tryphena to
represent Little Father Time. This evidence is produced partly
to refute Hardy’s typically devious denial that there is ‘a scrap of
personal detail in it’.
1
But Hardy’s obfuscations are often oblique truths and perhaps he
was right to throw the critic o
ff that particular scent. In relation to
the novel such information is trivial; it tells the biographer nothing
he does not know already and critically it is a distraction. It diverts
attention from the profounder sense in which Jude relates to its own
time by engaging with three major forces in late Victorian society.
These are the middle-class stranglehold on access to the most pres-
tigious university education and on its content; the awareness of
women that the self-estimates and roles forced on them by a patri-
archal society were not the only possible ones; and the unresolved
tension evoked by an established Christianity which for many
had lost rational justi
fication, but which was still socially and
imaginatively powerful.
Such a schema is crudely sociological and reductive, whereas the
novel itself struggles to express essentially hostile attitudes to these
forces, which reach the reader as the ‘series of seemings’ that Hardy
refers to in his original Preface. Only the surface symmetry of the
story matches the simplicity of the schematized outline: Jude’s hope-
ful and despairing visits to Christminster; Jude and Sue both unsuit-
ably married, divorced, and captured in the same marriage trap
1
F. E. Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (London, 
), .

---

again; the contrast of ‘
flesh and spirit’ represented by Arabella and
Sue, appealing to the two sides of Jude’s nature; Arabella’s child
killing Sue’s children; Jude liberated by grief, Sue subjugated by it.
This symmetrical and stylized design runs through the details of the
work: in the double seduction by Arabella, the double reference to
Samson, Sue praying to Venus and Apollo, then prostrate on the
floor of the ‘ritual church’, St Silas, a black heap contrasting with the
white heap she made when she leapt from Phillotson’s bedroom
window. But the design is merely a grid superimposed with a spe-
cious neatness on a presentation of turbulent contradictory views of
the three subjects. The epigraph to the whole novel, ‘The letter
killeth’, would make a better title, its meaning refracted by each of
the three themes. The incompleteness of the quotation is vital: in no