Performance Anxiety in Our Mutual Friend

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.

When John Bowen first approached me about giving a talk on Our Mutual Friend at the Dickens Universe, he proposed that I give what he called "a lecture-performance hybrid"—somewhat informative, like a lecture, and occasionally entertaining, like a performance. In dutiful compliance, I offer a five-act lecture about performance anxiety in Dickens, illustrated with a few readings from the novel. In my first act, I'll define what I mean by performance anxiety. My second and third acts will show how Dickens saw both writing and reading as kinds of performance. Then in my final acts, I'll provide two contrasting cases of performance in Our Mutual Friend.

Act One: The Lime-Trade

I'd like to introduce my topic with a brief performance that delighted me when I first read Our Mutual Friend ten years ago, but now makes me a little bit nervous. Our Mutual Friend was my Dickens gateway; it was the novel that made want to be a Victorianist. My father gave me a copy when I was in high school, but I wasn't sophisticated enough to read it then; I didn't pick it up until the summer before I started graduate school. What I loved about the novel at first was its relish in theatrical role-playing. So I'm going to start by reading a passage from the opening book, when Eugene and Mortimer are alternately tracking Gaffer Hexam and ogling Lizzie through her window, and the inspector suggests that they can disguise their business by pretending that they're interested in some lime works. "You hear Eugene?" said Lightwood. "You are deeply interested in lime." "Without lime," returned that unmoved barrister-at-law, "my existence would be unilluminated by a ray of hope" (161; bk. 1, ch. 12). No one actually seems suspicious of their presence, but Eugene still relishes the opportunity for idle role-play with Bob, the potboy at the Fellowship Porters:

Mortimer rang the bell to pay the score, and Bob appeared to transact that business with him: whom Eugene, in his careless extravagance, asked if he would like a situation in the lime-trade?

'Thankee sir, no sir,' said Bob. 'I've a good sitiwation here, sir.'

'If you change your mind at any time,' returned Eugene, 'come to me at my works, and you'll always find an opening in the lime-kiln.'

'Thankee sir,' said Bob.

'This is my partner,' said Eugene, 'who keeps the books and attends to the wages. A fair day's wages for a fair day's work is ever my partner's motto.'

'And a very good 'un it is, gentlemen,' said Bob, receiving his fee, and drawing a bow out of his head with his right hand, very much as he would have drawn a pint of beer out of the beer engine.

'Eugene,' Mortimer apostrophized him, laughing quite heartily when they were alone again, 'how can you be so ridiculous?'

'I am in a ridiculous humour,' quoth Eugene; 'I am a ridiculous fellow. Everything is ridiculous. Come along!'

(167; bk. 1, ch. 13)

Mortimer cues our response here: genuine amusement tempered by disapprobation. I think Eugene gives a pretty felicitous performance, extravagantly building his fictitious lime-trade into a localized works, equipped with a kiln, a business partner, an accounting system, even a trite management philosophy, represented in those wonderfully extended temporal modifiers ("at any time," "you'll always find," "is ever my partner's motto") that suggest Eugene's enduring commitment to his total improvisation. But there's also plenty to disapprove of, if that's your wont. There's Eugene the barrister's habitually dissolute vocation plot, as he's incapable of forming an unironic identification with any work or works—in contrast to the unflappable Bob, who has so much integrity as a potboy that he can't even make an exit bow without looking like he's drawing a pint. There's Eugene's typically toying condescension toward his social inferiors with their marked speech. There's his casual invocation of his "partner," such a dangerous word in this novel, where male bonds tend to lead to violence if they're not triangulated in marriage. And if you remember what Old Orlick tried to do to Pip in a lime-kiln back in Great Expectations, the prospect of always finding an opening in the limekiln may not sound so inviting.

These are problems on the level of character, however: I'm not really worried about Eugene's carelessness. I know Lizzie will redeem him, with the help of a near-death experience. I'm really worried about Dickens. The narrator repudiates the lime-trade performance as Eugene's characteristically "careless extravagance," but who's the performer that's usually associated with over-extended metaphors, with self-sustaining fictions, with parodies of business-speak, with the inability to pass up a chance to make his audience laugh? The most ridiculously extravagant words in this sequence come from the narrator: "apostrophized" and "quoth" are highly literary archaisms that remind us that we're subject to the old artificer's theatrical address. In a classic study called The Dickens Theatre, Robert Garis detects a stylistic restraint in Our Mutual Friend that he takes to mean "that Dickens's enormous energy was at last beginning to fail" (226). This passage suggests to me the reverse: a superfluous, restless energy that has to dispel itself in performance, that has to seize the proverbial limelight.

In Eugene's case, I think we recognize that restlessness, what Mortimer discerns as "a new-found intensification of all that was wildest and most negligent and reckless in his friend" (168–69; bk. 1, ch. 13), as erotic energy: the guilty thrill of having just spied on Lizzie, transfixed by "the brown flush of her cheek and the shining luster of her hair" (166; bk. 1, ch. 13), a thrill that unleashes desires that he can't figure out how to direct until he's writhing and moaning in bed at the end of the novel and Jenny Wren suggests a good four-letter word, one that rhymes with "life" (722; bk. 4, ch. 10). Eugene's ridiculous lime-trade charade is a performance that masks his swelling interest in Lizzie, an invitation to an imagined life of security delivered to Bob in lieu of the proposition he can never quite make to her. And I'd like to suggest that this engaging little playlet—it's really just sparkling dialogue with a few bits of stage business—reveals a similar displacement for Dickens. He knew that, on the page and in person, his brilliant performances could create intimacy with his audience, who loved his inimitable ingenuity, and he craved that intimate relationship. And yet he was always aware, I think, of the risk that performance could not adequately substitute for intimacy.

That's the first thing that I mean by "performance anxiety," the admittedly anachronistic term that I chose for my title: a fear about the alienating effects of theatricality. I'm going to explore a few other meanings as well. "Performance anxiety," that very common phobia of talking in front of an audience, is the late twentieth-century psychoanalytic phrase for what the nineteenth century called "stage fright," a term that saw a big spike in the mid-Victorian era, perhaps concurrent with the pressures of a newly respectable middle-class theater. The reason I like "performance anxiety," though, is that it has a double sense; it encompasses not only public performance but private performance, the fear of disappointing an audience of a thousand or an audience of one. It conveys the difficulty of achieving physical intimacy or communicating across vast space, and it expresses the fear that you will fail, in either setting, to rise to the occasion.

One of the questions that I'd like to raise is how Dickens managed his performance anxiety in writing Our Mutual Friend. In doing so, I hope to suggest a few of the ways that Dickens configured the relationship between writing and acting, between reading and hearing, and between the vast, diffuse reading public that Dickens created and the tight compact with his audience that he strove to cultivate. I hope thereby to offer an account of the role of performance in generating what I think of as "narrative intimacy"—that uncanny illusion of proximity between a fiction and its audience. Like Ivan Kreilkamp, Deborah Vlock, and David Kurnick, I'm interested in recovering the performing and theatrical voices behind the seemingly private experience of novel reading, and I'm excited about recent work by Anna Clark and Anne Sullivan on nineteenth-century staging practices that inform the narrative techniques of Victorian fiction.¹ Much of this work has focused on the relationship between performance and interiority, but instead, I'd like to suggest some ways that theater helped Dickens to create intimacy without interiority as well. To set this up, I'm going to give you some biographical evidence to develop my claim that Dickens suffered from performance anxiety in both of the contemporary senses.

Act Two: Stage Fright

I recognize that Dickens, the consummate performer, the indefatigable writer, the excessively productive father, may be the last person you would associate with performance anxiety—although there was that strange business about scheduling an audition for the Covent Garden theater in 1832 and then not showing up. (Just how bad a cold did he really have?) But he had a really hard time getting started on Our Mutual Friend. He wrote to his friend John Forster in the spring of 1864: "[I] feel that I had fallen short. I have grown hard to satisfy" (Letters 377). You could call this "writer's block," another late twentieth-century therapeutic term, but, of course, for Dickens, even private writing was always a kind of performance.

A popular image of Dickens's process of composition comes from the famous painting by Robert Buss of Dickens populating the world with his imagination, drowsing at his desk while tiny characters and scenes fill up the air around him—a painting called "Dickens's Dream." It seems poised between the classical myth of dream visitation and parthenogensis and the modern psychoanalytic theory of fiction as an expression of the author's subconscious. But its image of silent reverie occludes the evidence we have about the way Dickens actually wrote: which was awake, and out loud. Think of that wonderful story of his daughter, Mamie, convalescing in her father's study, watching him bound up to the mirror to talk to his own reflection, and then return to his writing-table to capture the words he had spoken (M. Dickens 42). "Every writer of fiction… writes in effect for the stage," Dickens told an audience at a dinner for the General Theatrical Fund in 1858, and the pressures of writing summoned the pressures of performing (Speeches 262). When he started producing the opening numbers for Our Mutual Friend in the winter of 1864, Dickens even wrote to Wilkie Collins that composing the novel felt like a daunting theatrical exhibition: "Strange to say I felt at first quite dazed in getting back to the large canvas and the big brushes; and even now, I have a sensation as of acting at the San Carlo after Tavistock House, which I could hardly have supposed would have come upon so old a stager" (Letters 10; 346).

These metaphors provide the fulcrum for my argument. The painting metaphor—"the large canvas and the big brushes"—summons the scale of Dickens's artistic production, both in its panorama of London society and in its material form. He hadn't written a big serialized novel in twenty monthly parts since Little Dorrit, which had wrapped up seven years earlier, and it took a while to get back into the rhythm. He overwrote one number by six pages, and he underwrote another—a slightly embarrassing premature ending that he claimed he hadn't done since he was a young man writing Pickwick. But it's the acting analogy that interests me: "a sensation as of acting at the San Carlo after Tavistock House." Tavistock House was, of course, the London home that Dickens leased in the 1850s and where he staged his amateur theatricals in the converted schoolroom, advertised to Dickens's friends as "The Smallest Theatre in the World" (A. Dickens 153). Dickens contrasts Tavistock House with the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, which he mentions in his Pictures from Italy; its vertiginous tiers seat thousands of people. So that disorienting sensation of trying to write Our Mutual Friend that Dickens confessed to Collins evoked not only a shift in production scale, but a shift in audience: a movement from the intimacy of a private domestic stage to the vast stalls of a public opera house. And that movement summoned fears for Dickens that, as a veteran performer ("so old a stager"), he was surprised to encounter.

The novel that emerged from that stage fright, I'd like to suggest, offers a virtuoso reenactment of Dickens's anxieties about performance scale. Of course, nearly everyone in the novel is a performer, playing a part, taking on a new identity, fabricating a costume, inventing a fiction—but what I want to focus on is the way Dickens represents these performances in terms of their audience venue. In its constant shifts from private to public space, from audiences of one to audiences of a whole society, the novel repeatedly gives us the dizzying sensation of acting at the San Carlo after Tavistock House, and it pursues both the pleasure and the danger of trying to retreat to the intimacy of the private schoolroom theater. Think of poor Bradley Headstone, watching Charlie attempt to castigate Eugene in their cruelly comic confrontation—Headstone, who was "used to the little audience of a school, and unused to the larger ways of men," and who therefore reacts naively by "show[ing] a kind of exultation" in his pupil's misguided performance (288; bk. 2, ch. 6). Think of a more confident shift in audience: Mr. Lammle, alone with his new wife on the sands of the Isle of Wight, telling her on the eve of their return to London: "We have pretended well enough to one another. Can't we, united, pretend to the world?" (130; bk. 1, ch. 10). And then remember the Lammles at the opera house, that grand stage, trying to prompt an intimate script between Fledgeby and Georgiana that the principals obtusely refuse to act. Silas Wegg adapts the communal ballad genre to the name of his individual customer, just as Mr. Boffin, presenting a miserly face to the world, turns out to have a target audience of only one for his performance. Dickens's narrative voice thunders from the public platform to address "Lords and Gentlemen and Honorable Boards" (199; bk. 1, ch. 16) and then whispers with the wind, "Father, was that you calling me?" (175; bk. 1, ch. 14).

Even the narrative syntax pivots scale, from the claustrophobia of the opening chapter, beginning with its imprisoning repetition ("In these times of ours… as an autumn evening was closing in" [13; bk. 1, ch. 1]—we're all trapped in the same boat), to the sudden eruption into the bubbling social chorus of the Veneerings' party in the second chapter, where the intimate Gothic melodrama of Lizzie, her father, and the corpse becomes fodder for Mortimer's wry narrative performance of the man drowned; or the shift at the end of the second book between another private melodrama, Headstone's thwarted proposal to Lizzie, and the immediate transformation in the next chapter of Lizzie's story for a large group audience at the Veneerings' anniversary occasion. You think you're nice and cozy in Tavistock House and then suddenly you're playing the San Carlo. These examples of unsettling movements when a private theatrical turns out to be public or a public performance turns out to have private audience function, I think, as figurations for Dickens's relationship with his immense reading public, the audience that he imagined filling up the San Carlo. In my next section, I'd like to discuss how Dickens dealt with his performance anxiety in his relationship with live audiences.

Act Three: Genteel Frigidity

In the years before he wrote Our Mutual Friend, and then again in the years immediately afterward, Dickens enacted his own quite literal shift from a private theater to a 3000-seat hall. The productions in Tavistock House concluded in 1857, as Dickens's marriage unraveled, and in 1858, Dickens began his professional reading tours.² The readings were not held in theaters, to avoid the taint of public acting, but in huge concert halls and exchanges. Dickens, however, exercised great effort to create the atmosphere of domestic intimacy in these public spaces. He brought a screen to shrink the performance space; he designed a reading desk to keep his body visible; he tested the acoustics extensively before each show. "I believe that I made the most distant person hear, as well as if I had been reading in my own room," he wrote to a friend. "Soon … we were all going on together … as if we had been sitting round the fire" (qtd. in Andrews 72). This fantasy of the shared hearth appealed to him; he wrote a few months later, "I must go to Bradford in Yorkshire, to read once more to a little fireside party of 4000" (qtd. in Andrews 72–73). We cannot know whether Dickens's intimacy with his reading audience compensated for his own shattered domesticity after his bitter separation from Catherine, though the readings may well have helped him regain control over his public persona. Dickens's attempts to create intimacy with the audience of his readings as a little fireside party could be criticized as faux-domesticity, exploiting the artifice of the hearth with a commercial enterprise foisted by a controlling author on a passive audience. But commanding the stage wasn't the same as silencing the audience, and indeed Dickens's performance depended on the active, vocal participation of his public.

Socially mixed provincial audiences seemed to satisfy him, but he told an acquaintance named Cuthbert Bede that during his London reading season, "he had sometimes been scarcely able to continue his reading, from the 'genteel' frigidity of his audience… it was the spontaneous appreciation of his reading, either by tears or laughter, that he so greatly looked for, and the absence of which almost 'froze the words in his mouth'" (21). You want to talk about performance anxiety? If his genteel audience doesn't respond spontaneously, either by secreting bodily fluids or emitting noises of pleasure, then they're "frigid," and Dickens freezes. This was 1858, the height of the stage fright epidemic. (If you want a contrary example of upwardly mobile reading as arousal, you could think of Silas Wegg, hoping to collect himself "like a genteel person" [88; bk. 1, ch. 7], with his wooden leg "slowly elevat[ing] itself" as he reads aloud to Mr. Boffin [476; bk. 3, ch. 6].³ According to the OED, the slang term "getting wood" does not arise, sadly, until the 1950s.)

Now, I recognize that I may appear guilty of what James Eli Adams cleverly calls "Reading with Buzfuz": following the suspicious barrister in Pickwick who looks for signs of sexual indiscretion in innocuous domestic language and then announces them in really suggestive ways ("the warming pan"). My interest, however, is only to discover how Dickens breaks the ice, how he escapes from the frigid spiral that traps him and his audience. His solution is to find an audience of one. A playwright named Herman Merivale recalled being that friendly face for one Dickens reading from Oliver Twist. The audience was dead; Dickens got bored; and then suddenly he performed a character that made Merivale laugh aloud, and keep laughing hysterically. "The audience of course glared at me But Dickens's eye … went at once straight for mine. 'Here's somebody who likes me, anyhow,' it said. For the next few minutes he read 'at me,' if ever man did. … And on my word the result was that he so warmed to his work that he got the whole audience in his hand, and dispensed with me" (qtd. in Andrews 214–15). Warming up, Dickens dispels the thaw of genteel frigidity.

Those of you with a good memory for prepositions might recall David Kurnick's wonderful analysis of reading "at me" in Great Expectations (Stages 99–102). He interpreted this pointed sensation as evidence of Pip's narcissism in assuming that everything was directed at him, characteristic of the psychological interior novel that is always gesturing back to the collective space of theater. That's a powerful dynamic, but I'm suggesting the reverse here: that Dickens's public performance longs not for interior psychology but for the direct private address of an imagined individual audience. And that reading "at me" doesn't seem to have been Merivale's projection: Dickens himself told Cuthbert Bede how much he appreciated someone in the back row—less genteel, no doubt—at a "Christmas Carol" reading who let out a guffaw when Dickens described Scrooge's cell as "a sort of tank." That laugh apparently served to "unfreeze" the audience, and the requisite "tears and plaudits" followed; Dickens said that he "instinctively blessed the person" for his thawing laughter.

What does this have to do with Our Mutual Friend? As I've been trying to suggest, this novel is highly attentive to the pleasure and danger of performing for an audience of one. I'll admit that Our Mutual Friend doesn't have as much conventional theater as some of the other novels; there are no Crummleses or Wopsles. Somewhat unusually, it wasn't adapted for the stage during its serialization (as Pickwick and Nickleby had been), and Dickens didn't submit a preemptive adaptation to secure the stage copyright, as he did for Great Expectations. He didn't perform a public reading of Our Mutual Friend or even prepare a script, as he did for Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. In fact, since he almost never performed anything that he wrote after David Copperfield, except for Christmas stories, his readings have a kind of nostalgia tour quality: an artist in his 50s trotting out the greatest hits of his 20s and 30s. But in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's theatrical energy is displaced onto a host of social performances, onto characters like Wegg and Sloppy who read aloud, and onto the creation of the novel itself as a script for our own auditory performance. In the remainder of my discussion, I'm going to look at two passages from this script to see their different approaches to the problem of achieving intimacy through performance.

Act Four: Bow Wow (Wow)

If Dickens had done a public reading from Our Mutual Friend, I'm pretty sure that the Boffin plot would have been its backbone. I know that John Glavin dismissed the Boffins as "bosh" when he wrote an adaptation for the Dickens Universe in the '80s, but as in all things, he was bucking the trend. Nearly every early dramatic version of the novel took the Boffin plot as its leading strand. There was "The Golden Dustman" at Sadler's Wells in 1866, "The Dustman's Treasure" at the Britannia in 1866, another "Golden Dustman" in Leeds in 1867 (Bolton 431). The Boffin plot (and I mean plot in the sense of "conspiracy" as well as narrative structure), the so-called "pious fraud," has drawn a lot of deserved criticism from those of us who don't like being defrauded, and don't want Bella to be, either. If that's your response to the Boffins, you might enjoy the erudite defenses of the morality and theatricality of the "pious fraud" by Edwin Eigner and Murray Baumgarten. (As Eigner points out, the Boffin plot is in part an adaptation of play called The Hunchback, by James Sheridan Knowles, which happened to be running at Covent Garden in 1832 when Dickens skipped his audition. Coincidence?) My interest lies in Dickens's insistence on his own performative powers in stage-managing this sequence. I'm thinking specifically about the most absurd line in Our Mutual Friend. The climax of Boffin's miserly performance, as you recall, comes when he's denouncing Rokesmith's allegedly pecuniary motives for wooing Bella, and when John protests that he was attempting to "win her affections and possess her heart," Boffin replies as follows:

"Win her affections," retorted Mr Boffin, with ineffable contempt, "and possess her heart! Mew says the cat, Quack-quack says the duck, Bow-wow-wow says the dog! Win her affections and possess her heart! Mew, Quack-quack, Bow-wow!"

(583; bk. 3, ch. 15)

What is there to say? The skeptical sentiments may be those of a miser, but the delivery is pure profligacy. There's a glorious, self-delighted extravagance in Boffin's performance, which you know because he says the same ridiculous thing twice. I agree to a certain extent with Hilary Schor that "Quack quack says the duck" signals the dehumanizing effects of money that Bella has to resist, though animals aren't all bad in Our Mutual Friend (195). We like Wrens, for instance, and Bella says that if some true friend could make Boffin bankrupt, he "would be a Duck" (584; bk. 3, ch. 15). It seems more significant to me that we're in the fairy tale realm of voluble animals and the childish register of nursery rhymes. Dickens is adapting a nursery rhyme that runs: "Bow-wow, says the dog, / Mew, mew says the cat, / Grunt, grunt, goes the hog, / And squeak goes the rat" (OMF, ed. note 832n2). But note the difference: instead of that regular repeated double cadence, Dickens goes for mounting drama: "Mew says the cat, Quack-quack says the duck, Bow-wow-wow says the dog!" He cuts one of the cat's lines but gives more screen time to the dog; he adds that extra "wow" factor, that superfluous performance energy.

There's a precedent for things that say "bow-wow-wow" in Dickens: Barnaby Rudge's talking raven, for instance, exclaims "bow-wow-wow," and R. Wilfer gets the nickname "Rumty" from a chorus that runs: "Rumty iddity, row dow dow, / Sing toodlely, teedlely, bow wow wow" (41; bk. 1, ch. 4). But there's also a broader cultural valence of the expression as a kind of woofy showmanship. You might think of Walter Scott, Dickens's great precursor, contrasting Jane Austen's intimate scale with his own "big bow-wow strain," or the Times theater critic who lamented the persistence of a "strutting, strident, 'bow wow' school" of acting on the more naturalistic stage of the 1860s (qtd. in Andrews 245). I bring this up because I think Boffin's "bow-wow" is one of the most extravagantly bow-wow performances in all of Dickens. And I think this because after having Boffin do the bow-wow twice in the denunciation scene, he has him do it twice more in the revelation scene. After all has been explained, Mr. Boffin tells Bella:

"I assure you, my dear, that on the celebrated day when I made what has since been agreed upon to be my grandest demonstration—I allude to Mew says the cat, Quack quack says the duck, and Bow-wow-wow says the dog—I assure you, my dear, that on that celebrated day, them flinty and unbeliving words hit my old lady so hard on my account, that I had to hold her, to prevent her running out after you, and defending me by saying I was playing a part."

Mrs Boffin laughed heartily again, and her eyes glistened again, and it then appeared, not only that in that burst of sarcastic eloquence Mr Boffin was considered by his two fellow-conspirators to have outdone himself, but that in his own opinion it was a remarkable achievement.

(756; bk. 4, ch. 13)

This must be what it was like to go to an after-party for one of Dickens's public readings. I don't think I've ever read such a delightfully, gratuitously self-satisfied account of someone's own performance. (Does Mrs. Boffin really have to explain that a grown man who says "Bow-wow-wow says the dog" is playing a part?) And what I love about it is that Dickens is clearly both indulging and satirizing his own propensity for bow-wow performance; it's self-congratulation and self-mockery to call your own dialogue "a remarkable achievement."

And it's not over! The original manuscript of Our Mutual Friend in the Morgan Library in New York includes Dickens's working notes. Harry Stone published a fine facsimile of these notes, but when I looked at the original version, I saw something that I hadn't perceived in the facsimile. The last line on the bottom left of Dickens's plan for the end of the revelation chapter reads: "And so," says Mr. Boffin, radiantly quoting himself in his feigning: "Mew, quack quack, Bow wow!" (Stone 370). What close examination of the original manuscript reveals, however, is that Dickens writes the first part as a stand-alone phrase: '"And so,'" says Mr Boffin, radiant.' That's a cue for the cheery exposition. (In the chapter as written, it ends up being Mrs. Boffin who says the explanatory "And so," and Mr Boffin's countenance is described as "shining" instead of "radiant," but the gist is here.) Then, you can see in the manuscript that after writing that first phrase, Dickens gets some more ink or changes his nib and comes back with a new inspiration written in a different pen stroke. Boffin will not just be radiant, but 'radiantly quoting himself in his feigning: "Mew, quack quack, Bow wow!"' In that big ink blotch and that inserted caret, the manuscript shows Dickens realizing the opportunity to squeeze one more bow-wow into his last number. He loves self-quotation; it's like trademarking a phrase: not only does the character have a tag-line, but he quotes himself quoting it, as though he's modeling its quotability for listeners at home. This is narrative intimacy not through interiority, but through self-conscious repetition of a performance script to engender household words.⁴

When you turn back to the published book, you see the result: in the final lines of the revelation chapter, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin look in on Harmony restored, and here's what Mrs. Boffin says to Mr. Boffin:

'And it makes a pretty and a promising picter; don't it?' 'Yes, old lady.'

But, aware at the instant of a fine opening for a point, Mr Boffin quenched that observation in this—delivered in the grisliest growling of the regular brown bear. 'A pretty and a hopeful picter? Mew, Quack quack, Bow-wow!' And then trotted silently downstairs, with his shoulders in a state of the liveliest commotion.

(757–58; bk. 4, ch. 13)

This is Mr. Boffin playing "Mr. Boffin" playing Mr. Boffin, but the working notes show that the "instant" awareness of the opening for a point was Dickens's own: he happens upon the idea for Boffin's self-quotation, then displaces his inspiration onto his character. Even more exuberantly, even more superfluously than Eugene's lime-fiction, this is a performance that demands, that solicits our admiring applause and laughter. I mentioned that when I first read Our Mutual Friend, this was what I loved about it. But re-reading it now, I'm more drawn to a very different kind of performance mode, and so I want to close by briefly describing an alternative to the bow-wow strain.

Act Five: Are you afraid to kiss me?

I want to conclude with a character whom I didn't think had anything to do with the kind of performativity I was tracing: Betty Higden, the elderly, charitable, impoverished woman who, when her health fails her, flees to her death rather than risk being confined in a workhouse. I'd like to build on Talia Schaffer's idea that Betty could be the novel's titular "mutual friend," in part because Betty can shift our focus from the combative male hierarchy that defined the novel for Eve Sedgwick in Between Men to a companionate network of female intimacy. When we first meet Betty, she's discreetly positioned in opposition to the novel's playfully gratuitous showmanship. Here's the scene where Mrs. Boffin meets the orphan Johnny in the company of Betty's little minders, Toddles and Poddles.

"Toddles was the pet-name of the boy; Poddles of the girl. At their little unsteady pace, they came across the floor, hand-in-hand, as if they were traversing an extremely difficult road intersected by brooks, and, when they had had their heads patted by Mrs Betty Higden, made lunges at the orphan, dramatically representing an attempt to bear him, crowing, into captivity and slavery. All the three children enjoyed this to a delightful extent, and the sympathetic Sloppy again laughed long and loud. When it was discreet to stop the play, Betty Higden said 'Go to your seats Toddles and Poddles,' and they returned hand-in-hand across country, seeming to find the brooks rather swollen by late rains."

(199; bk. 1, ch. 16)

Toddles and Poddles are Dickensian figures of exuberant performance, with their ridiculous rhyming names, their imaginative play of crossing the floor as if it were a "road intersected by brooks," their dramatic representation of capturing Johnny into mock-slavery, and especially their extended conceit of the imagined brooks across the floor becoming "rather swollen by late rains"; I see the lime-trade in their future. But Betty serves as a gentle counter-weight, reversing their movement "when it was discreet to stop the play." Betty's alternative to Dickensian performance also comes through in the line we all love: "Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices" (198; bk. 1, ch. 16). Dickens is, of course, doing Betty in a different voice by marking her lower-class speech with the non-standard "He do" instead of "He does." But by saying "He do," Betty as a speaker is removing differentiation, lining up the third person singular with all the other conjugations: I do, you do, they do, we do, he do. Unlike Dickens, that is to say, Betty don't do different voices.

Toddles and Poddles' journey across imagined rivers and roads, however, anticipates Betty's own far more difficult escape along the river to avoid captivity, and I'm going to end with her journey's end. Here's why. Dickens loved to end his public readings with a death scene, and Christopher Lord, the Dickens mystery novelist, told me that this is the best one. It's easy to dismiss as sentimental, but it's technically remarkable, the most intimate performance that Dickens ever wrote. Look at the layout of the scene on the page. It starts after a line of five asterisks and the comment, "The darkness gone, and a face bending down" (505–06; bk. 3, ch. 8). It's the script of a play. It's forty lines of dialogue with a few present-tense stage directions: "She reads it with surprise and looks down with a new expression"; "A look of thankfulness and triumph lights the worn old face" (506; bk. 3, ch. 8). In his prompt books for the public readings, Dickens cut the "he saids" and "she saids" and just kept a few descriptions of action, which is exactly what he does here. The speakers are never identified by tags, and we only get the occasional descriptive phrase: "with a convulsed struggle" or "with another struggle" (506; bk. 3, ch. 8). But if the form of a play script makes us expect the big bow wow, the dialogue is remarkably simple and hushed. It's so quiet, in fact, that it's inaudible. Listen to this. Betty speaks first, then Lizzie:

'Have I been long dead?'

'I don't understand what you say. Let me wet your lips again…'

'Am I not dead?'

'I cannot understand what you say. Your voice is so low and broken that I cannot hear you. Do you hear me?'

'Yes.'

'Do you mean Yes?'

'Yes.'

(505; bk. 3, ch. 8)

Besides the almost modernist minimalism of the dialogue, the acoustics here, the configurations of auditory space, are astounding. Lizzie is close enough to Betty that she can wet her lips, but she can't understand what she's saying. But we can hear Betty perfectly. That means we're being imaginatively positioned closer to Betty than Lizzie is. We might even be inside her head, as this passage's brief movement into the first person initially suggests: "all is over with me on earth, and this must be an Angel" (505; bk. 3, ch. 8). But after aligning us with Betty's nearly posthumous perspective, the narrative stage directions revert to third person, positioning us outside Betty's mind, but extremely close to her body—so close, in fact, that when Lizzie says: "What was it that you asked me? Wait till I bring my ear quite close," our ear must be closer, nestled up against those parched lips. We expect to reach narrative intimacy through interiority, but this is highly dramatic intimacy through exteriority: performing for an audience of one that envelops every auditor. In a sense, when Lizzie kisses Betty's mouth at the end of this scene, we have already done so: our ears have brushed against her inaudible mouth; our lips have moved to the sounds of her broken speech. Here's the ending:

'I must be sore disfigured. Are you afraid to kiss me?'

The answer is, the ready pressure of her lips upon the cold but smiling mouth.

'Bless ye! NOW lift me, my love.'

Lizzie Hexam very softly raised the weather-stained grey head, and lifted her as high as Heaven.

(506; bk. 3, ch. 8)

If we believe in this apotheosis, it's the effect not only of all the biblical allusions in the preceding pages, but of the tender acoustics of this scene. Can you hear the gentle alliteration that takes us from this life to the next? "Hexam … her … head … high … Heaven." It's a repeated "h," the sound of a breath. Respiration becomes a kind of aspiration. Hexam loses its cursed hex and becomes heaven. It's here that Dickens transcends his performance anxiety through that most theatrical of techniques, the barely voiced breath that no one can hear except the audience: the stage whisper.