What is the author's style in Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy?

The novel is written in formal English. The author is clearly an educated man and his language reflects that in his writing. Not only this, but the novel was written in the late 1800s, a time period when language was still an important aspect of everyday speech and writing, keeping slang a thing of the poorly educated and out of literature. The language of this novel tends to be much more formal than language that modern readers might be accustomed to for this reason.