“Making the University less exclusive”:
The Legacy of Jude the Obscure
Keywords:
access, Crowther Report, Thomas Hardy, higher education, Jude the Obscure, John Henry Newman, Robbins Report, Ruskin College, universitiesAbstract
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) condemns an elite and inaccessible system of Victorian higher education. While the influence of the novel on the social and political discourses of the 1890s is well known, its subsequent appearance in twentieth- and twentyfirst-century debates on university access is less recognised. The four non-literary texts considered in this essay evoke Jude the Obscure in order to highlight particular aspects of higher education in their own time. They understand Jude in radically different ways, associating Hardy’s character with either progressive or conservative conceptions of universities. This essay ends by considering recent developments surrounding access to higher education. It suggests that the continuing timeliness of Jude the Obscure comes from
its imaginative evocation of a set of problems that remain unsolved.
