IT WAS FORMANY YEARS conventional in Hardy studies to treat his rustics — those minor working-class characters who flesh out rural communities, especially in the early novels — in terms that effectively muted their ideological significance: to consider them as literary conventions like the chorus of Greek tragedy or Shakespeare’s clowns, for instance, or at best nostalgic details of local color (for examples, see Wotton 189–91). More recently, some Marxist critics have exposed the biases of such approaches, although at times oversimplifying in other ways the ideological functions of these characters.1 My objective in this essay is to argue for what I see as the more complicated and more dialogic ways in which these minor characters function to focus issues of social mobility that are at the heart of Hardy’s fiction. I am interested in the ways rustic characters function as agents of class rivalry, but more specifically in the ways their characteristic behaviors help to define by contrast the kinds of subjectivity that justify the higher social positions of the more central characters. Hardy’s characteristic combination of this strategy with the more conventional one for advancing bourgeois values in the Victorian novel — by exposing the unworthiness of gentry and aristocrats — can be linked to his insecurities about his own class identity and the repressions involved in maintaining it. He sympathized with the resentments of the lower classes, yet was also invested in positioning them as different from those who, like himself,