Performance Anxiety in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

Abstract The theatricality of Our Mutual Friend seems most apparent in its many schemers' extravagant role-playing and pious frauds. But in Betty Higden's death scene, Dickens stages a new form of narrative intimacy based not on interiority but on the dramatic acoustics of very close exteriority. This article also considers Dickens's own strategies as a writer and public reader to achieve intimacy through performance across a range of theatrical scales. This is the slightly modified script of a paper delivered at the 2014 Dickens Universe at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This piece offers an account of Dickens's relationship with his audiences through performance—on the page and in person—and since the lecture itself attempts to enact some of Dickens's performance techniques, various markers of its oral delivery have been preserved here.