The first character that we encounter is Utterson who is a lawyer and drives a plot. He seems like a hard character, which is described as “never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary at somehow lovable” (5). Jekyll and Hyde appear indirectly through Mr. Enfield’s account on “a very odd story” (7) that he witnessed one night on “a bystreet in a busy quarter of London (6) where a man trampled over a young girl. In Enfield’s account of the incident, Hyde is first mentioned as “a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk” and also as a person “[not] like a man” but “like a some damned Juggernaut” (7). But there is no chance that I can catch to know that it is Hyde. He turns out to be another half of Dr. Jekyll almost at the end of the chapter, only after the lawyer inquires his name. While Enfield does not mention Jekyll’s full name, Utterson seemingly recognizes that the well-known figure mentioned by Enfield is Jekyll. As well-kept Victorian professionals, the two mutually agree never to refer the incident. …show more content…
This is a partly plausible explanation which can be applied on Jekyll and Hyde, for there are a number of textual evidence indicating the characters’ stature. In the part where he mentions the check which is signed under the name of Jekyll, for instance, Enfield notes that he believes the case is of black mail, and he calls the house which Hyde is dwelling a “Blackmail House” (9). If the case really is of blackmail, then the two should not refer to the incident until the case becomes clear, for it might hurt their friend’s reputation of a well-known