The poetics of social deviance in 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles!Dickens

During the Victorian period, social deviance became a source of growing interest and anxiety. Charles Dickens's novels are particularly interesting in this respect because they present a extraordinary range of very striking cases of norms and deviance. Our Mutual Friend, for instance, depicts dubious riverside characters, as well as a suspicious murder and an attempted murder. It also portrays seemingly perfect embodiments of Victorian orthodoxy, such as Lizzie Hexam and the ideal couple formed by Bella Wilfer and John Harmon alias John Rokesmith. This paper analyses the textual construction of social deviance in Our Mutual Friend. It shows that the novel legitimises Victorian orthodoxy by condemning social deviance but that it also deviates from this orthodoxy by combining and opposing systems of norms, and by using disturbing focalisation. It finally takes a closer look at the stylistic, semantic, syntactic and narrative components of the discourse on social deviance in this novel.