“The True Meaning of the Word Restoration”: Architecture and Obsolescence in Jude the Obscure

This essay situates Jude the Obscure (1895) in the context of the Victorian architectural restoration debate, a pitched battle of ideas in which Thomas Hardy (a former architect and preservation activist) was deeply involved. For Hardy, architectural restoration threatens historical continuity by approaching history as a traumatic process that must be reversed. In Jude this restorationist vision is disastrously triumphant, trapping the novel’s characters in cycles of meaningless repetition. In response, Hardy explores how the novel might serve as a compensatory medium, emplacing and connecting its characters in ways that material architecture no longer can. At the same time, Hardy imagines the printed text as a material object not unlike architecture, potentially opening up his work to contingent and unanticipated meanings.