Lisa Merrill’s 2012 work on the Crafts at the 1851 Great Exhibition examines that specific event as a performance of the kind they had been trained in by years on the lecture circuit — a deliberate deployment of their presence and appearance to make a political argument in a specific public context. The Great Exhibition was watched by many people who knew who the Crafts were; their appearance at it, in the way they appeared, was not incidental.
Geoffrey Sanborn’s work on the theatricality of the escape and the narrative examines the performed quality of both — the ways in which the disguise required the skills of an actor, and the ways in which the narrative is constructed with the rhetorical awareness of experienced public speakers. The Crafts had been lecturing for more than a decade by the time they wrote the book; the book is in some sense the distillation of what a decade of telling the story to audiences had taught them about what worked.
Ellen Samuels’s work on disability, race, and gender in the memoir examines the disability performance — the arm sling, the invalid’s presentation — as a dimension of the disguise that intersected with both the racial and gender performances in specific ways. The invalid Southern gentleman was a recognizable social type whose infirmity explained his need for care (the “servant”) and his inability to write (the sling). The disability wasn’t just a practical fix for the signature problem; it was a social role that made the rest of the performance more coherent.