ABSTRACT
about ten days after he had seen the performance of The Three Wayfarers Hardy did something that he had long promised himself to do: he visited Oxford. As far back as the early eighteen sixties, when he had been a young assistant architect in London, he had written his sister Mary: 'Oxford must be a jolly place. I shall try to get down there some time or other.' Mary Hardy had been to Oxford several times, but for one reason or another her brother's desire to visit the University city had apparently never been satisfied. 1 Now, however, he had a special reason for wishing to see Oxford; he had decided that his next novel would deal with the keen desire of a poor boy for an Oxford education and with the tragic frustration of that desire. Chance or accident was to play almost no part in the new novel. Jude's frustration was to be brought about not by Crass Casualty—Hardy had by now outgrown any desire to emphasize that view of things—but by the callously indifferent and irresponsible action of Victorian society. In this theme Hardy felt that 'there is something the world ought to be shown, and I am the one to show it to them'. 2
