’ JUDE THE OBSCURE T H was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on June ; his father was a builder in a small way of business, and he was educated locally and in Dorchester before being articled to an architect. After sixteen years in that profession and the publication of his earliest novel Desperate Remedies (), he determined to make his career in literature; not, however, before his work as an architect had led to his meeting, at St Juliot in Cornwall, Emma Gifford, who became his first wife in . In the s Hardy had written a substantial amount of unpublished verse, but during the next twenty years almost all his creative effort went into novels and short stories. Jude the Obscure, the last written of his novels, came out in , closing a sequence of fiction that includes Far from the Madding Crowd (), The Return of the Native (), Two on a Tower (), The Mayor of Casterbridge (), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (). Hardy maintained in later life that only in poetry could he truly express his ideas; and the more than nine hundred poems in his collected verse (almost all published after ) possess great individuality and power. In Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit; in Emma died and two years later he married Florence Dugdale. Thomas Hardy died in January ; the work he left behind––the novels, the poetry, and the epic drama The Dynasts––forms one of the supreme achievements in English imaginative literature. P I is a Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She has written the definitive analysis of how Jude the Obscure evolved during composition, as well as several other articles and chapters on Hardy. ’ For over years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over titles–– from the ,-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels–– the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS THOMAS HARDY Jude the Obscure Edited with an Introduction and Notes by PATRICIA INGHAM 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Text, Introduction, Note on the Text, Explanatory Notes © Patricia Ingham 1985 Updated Select Bibliography © Patricia Ingham 2002 Chronology © Patricia Ingham 2002 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1985 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998 Revised edition 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928. Jude the obscure/Thomas Hardy; edited with an introduction and notes by Patricia Ingham. p. cm.–– (Oxford world’s classics) Updated select bibliography. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–19–280261–5 1. Stonemasons–– Fiction. 2. Illegitimate children–– Fiction. 3. Unmarried couples–– Fiction. 4. Children–– Death–– Fiction. 5. Wessex (England)–– Fiction. 6. Adultery–– Fiction. I. Ingham, Patricia. II. Title. III. Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press). PR4746.A2.T39 2002 823′.8–– dc21 2001052326 ISBN 0–19–280261–5 13579108642 Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire GENERAL CONTENTS 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 effect 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 Gifford– 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 off 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 justification, 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, ), . xii Introduction 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 part of the story does ‘the spirit’ give life. The account of failed academic hopes has, unlike the sexual story, often been read simplistically, particularly when taken as a reflection of Hardy’s own university hopes thwarted by poverty and lack of influence.