Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

particular place and provided with an epigraph. This preparation,
which took place in the summer of 
 after Hardy finished writing
the novel in March, is generally assumed to have been as he
described it: a simple process of deleting blue and green ‘serial alter-
ations’ from the original black-ink manuscript, which already shows
layers of alteration and a core in which Sue not Phillotson was the
focus of Jude’s Christminster hopes.
1
As usual with Hardy, the process of preparation for volume publi-
cation was not as he would have it seem. The manuscript (which
lacks most of those pages which refer to ‘objectionable’ incidents)
was not the copy for either of the 
first two printed texts. For each,
another copy was prepared, and the one for the volume edition was
made with the serial text to hand. It incorporates and even increases
various trivial bowdlerizings from the serial, so beginning a process
which continued, surprisingly, up to Hardy’s last revised version––
thus perpetuating the bowdlerizing of details relating to sex and
1
See J. Paterson, ‘The Genesis of Jude the Obscure’, Studies in Philology 
 (),
–; and P. Ingham, ‘The Evolution of Jude the Obscure’, RES  (), – and
–.

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religion, even though they occur alongside major comments and
incidents of an unparalleled explicitness in contemporary literature.
Jude, for instance, no longer says that he doubts whether he is even a
Christian, and a cutting reference when Sue remarries to God’s
establishment of matrimony is omitted. Jude’s bitter diatribe on
marriage to Mrs Edlin during her last visit is toned down. Neither
the diatribe nor the pig’s-pizzle episode was ever restored to the
explicitness of the manuscript.
Despite this authorial timidity Hardy made many substantial
changes while preparing copy for the First Edition from the manu-
script. The narrative was reshaped by removing the long description
of Shaston (suitably modi
fied) from before Sue’s first marriage to
Phillotson to a time after it, so that it began the Shaston section.
There is a factual change in the increasing of Sue and Jude’s own
children from one to two, before the violent deaths. Jude is made to
reject the Church explicitly when he goes away with Sue, and to
utter a long lamentation from Job on his death-bed. Sue is turned
into a more complex, less spontaneous 
figure by several minor but
powerful changes which write in the ‘elusiveness of her curious
double nature’, and make her more ready to coquette or feign (see
notes to p. 
). Even Phillotson is made more complicated: in the
manuscript his liberalism about releasing Sue is beaten out of him by
the social consequences; in the First Edition he keeps his views
unchanged but conceals them and takes her back as a cynically
prudential move.
In addition, the 
 ‘First Edition’ was marred, like the serial, by
the imposition of printing-house punctuation quite di
fferent from
the treatment in the manuscript, characteristic of Hardy, which is
altogether more sparing and forceful.
1
In proof Hardy accepted this
new punctuation, which it would by then have been impossible to get
rid of, tinkering with it only in minor ways. But, as always, in cor-
recting and checking he could not resist revising, and added to the
revises another spectre amongst those Jude imagines when he 
first
goes to Christminster: Gibbon quoting from his Decline and Fall.
Again, when the German ‘Tauchnitz Edition’ appeared in 
,
the non-authorial punctuation of the First Edition became more
firmly established, since Tauchnitz used the Osgood McIlvaine text
1
See S. Gatrell, ‘Hardy, House-Style, and the Aesthetics of Punctuation’, The Novels
of Thomas Hardy
, ed. A. Smith (
), –.
Note on the Text
xxiii

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(though not the actual printing plates). Further, the insidious trivial
bowdlerizing was now a normal part of each new text and is seen