For the remaining 33 years of his life Hardy published only verse. He died on January 11, 1928. His ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey, and his heart was buried, as he had requested, in the church at Stinsford, near his birthplace. Hardy claimed that his turn from fiction to poetry was due at least partly to the negative reviews received by Jude the Obscure, a novel that powerfully criticized some aspects of society in the late Victorian era.
Class barriers to university admission. A central aspect of Jude the Obscure is Jude’s boyhood dream of attending the great university at Christminster in Hardy’s fictional world of Wessex. (Christminster is based on Oxford University, and Wessex on Hardy’s native county of Dorset.) In fact, a working-class boy like Jude would have no formal training to realize his dream. Free elementary education for all children in England was not mandated until the Education Act of 1870 or made compulsory until 1880. When Jude was a child, in the late 1850s, day schools of various sorts provided the only access to education for children of the lower classes.
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