How is reputation presented in Jekyll and Hyde?

How does reputation develop as a theme across the novella?

Almost every respectable character in this novella (a short novel) guards a reputation, and almost every mystery in it survives because someone decides to keep quiet.

Chapter 1 sets the rules. Enfield will not ask questions about anything that looks like scandal, and he and Utterson agree never to mention the story again. Hyde, meanwhile, pays the girl's family once he is threatened with scandal. In Chapter 2 Utterson's worst fear is "disgrace", and he suspects Jekyll is being punished for "some old sin".

The middle chapters are full of locked safes and sealed envelopes. Utterson hides the forged note in Chapter 5 and keeps Lanyon's letter unopened out of "professional honour" in Chapter 6. Even in Chapter 8 he is thinking about Jekyll's "credit". Chapter 10 finally explains the root of it all: Jekyll's shame about his pleasures, and his need to keep his head high in public.

Which moments show reputation and secrecy most clearly?

Chapter 1, Enfield's rule. Enfield's motto is "the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask". Queer Street was Victorian slang for trouble, especially money trouble. He explains that asking a question is "like starting a stone": it rolls downhill and ends up knocking some respectable old gentleman on the head. In this society curiosity is dangerous and not knowing is polite.

Chapter 1, the threat. When Enfield and a doctor confront Hyde, they threaten to "make his name stink from one end of London to the other". Their weapon is not the police but scandal. Hyde gives in and pays, with a cheque signed by a well-known name. Reputation is the currency the whole city trades in.

Chapter 2, Utterson's fear. Putting Jekyll's will back in his safe, Utterson says "I thought it was madness", then adds "and now I begin to fear it is disgrace". The order tells us which he thinks is worse. He then wonders whether Jekyll is paying for "the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace". Hidden sin is pictured as a disease spreading out of sight.

Chapter 10, the confession. Jekyll admits, "I concealed my pleasures", because of his "imperious desire to carry my head high". He pictures himself carrying "a load of genial respectability" in public: respectability is a weight he must "plod" under, and Hyde lets him put it down. "Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes," he writes (bravos are hired thugs), but he was the first to do it for his pleasures.

What context matters for reputation?

Context (AO3, the assessment objective about a text's time) is essential for this theme. Jekyll and Hyde was published in 1886, and its world is the world of the Victorian gentleman.

Victorian respectability. Middle- and upper-class Victorians were judged by their public behaviour: self-control, hard work, religion and propriety. A doctor or a lawyer depended on a good name for his living, and scandal could ruin him. That is why the characters treat discretion, keeping quiet about what they know, as a virtue.

The divided city. Respectable Victorians lived close to districts they would never admit to visiting. In the novella Soho is only a cab ride from Jekyll's square, yet it seems "like a district of some city in a nightmare". Hyde's rooms there, and the back door of Jekyll's house, give a respectable man a way into that other London without being seen.

Darwin and degeneration. After Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) argued that humans evolved from animal ancestors, some Victorians feared that civilised behaviour was only a thin layer over something more savage. Respectability was meant to show how far people had risen above the animal. Hyde's "ape-like fury" suggests it might only be covering the animal up.

What might an exam question ask about reputation?

For AQA, Jekyll and Hyde sits in Section B of Paper 1. You get one question: a printed extract to analyse, then the novel as a whole, worth 30 marks, with no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section. The wording might be "respectability" or "secrecy" rather than "reputation", and this page covers both.

Two focuses to practise: how Stevenson presents the importance of reputation, starting with Enfield's story in Chapter 1; and how Stevenson presents secrecy in the novel as a whole.

A model paragraph on the first focus:

Stevenson suggests that the obsession with reputation is what makes Hyde possible. Jekyll admits "I concealed my pleasures" because of his "imperious desire to carry my head high", so shame, not wickedness, drives the experiment. His image of "a load of genial respectability" is telling: respectability is a burden he has to "plod" under in public, and Hyde is his way of putting it down. Stevenson does not excuse Jekyll, but he implies that a society which cared more about appearances than honesty taught its gentlemen to hide their sins rather than face them. The horror begins in the drawing room, not the slum.

Key quotations to learn

Six quotations that show how much the characters will do to protect a name:

• "the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask" (Enfield, Chapter 1): polite silence as a rule of life.
• "make his name stink from one end of London to the other" (Enfield, Chapter 1): scandal used as a weapon.
• "and now I begin to fear it is disgrace" (Utterson, Chapter 2): disgrace feared more than madness.
• "I was thinking of my own character" (Jekyll, Chapter 5): reputation put before a murdered man.
• "we may at least save his credit" (Utterson, Chapter 8): protecting a name to the end.
• "a load of genial respectability" (Jekyll, Chapter 10): respectability as a burden.