The title of the first volume of Our Mutual Friend, “Between the Cup and the Lip,” draws attention to the gap between intention and outcome: there’s many a slip, so the saying goes, ’twixt the cup and the lip.1 Dickens follows up this thematic signal with three short vignettes highlighting the role of intentionality in agency. In the first chapter, a dead body, the epitome of intentionless impotence, is ransacked by two unsavory rivermen. In the second chapter, a jaded solicitor regales a gathering of parvenus and their hangers-on with the story of an old miser’s postmortem attempt to control his son and heir by fashioning a humiliating Hobson’s choice in his will: marry a stranger of the father’s choosing or forfeit the family fortune. When a missive about the heir, one John Harmon, interrupts this narration, we encounter yet a third approach to intentionality and agency, as the assembled company wonders whether the son’s fate depends on his own will or on the father’s: