You give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life

The maxim “You give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life” is a saying Joseph Pritchard inherits from his father and later applies to himself. In the novel, it expresses how a judgment can become more than a description: remembered and accepted, it helps shape the identity it appears merely to name.

The saying’s origin

Pritchard recalls his father holding a newborn puppy against his chest while warning him, “you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life.” The memory has a small, concrete sequel: the next day Pritchard names the puppy Cromwell, and his father nods. The lesson therefore comes paired with an act of naming. A name can cling to its bearer, but Pritchard himself supplies the puppy’s name.

Pritchard turns the maxim inward

Years later, Pritchard remembers the saying while alone in his laboratory. He has returned to his drug hall exhausted and withdrawn from work; Mary Menzies’s rejection occupies his thoughts. He recalls her words, “You have never been at peace with good,” and recognizes that he has kept them alive by writing them down. He understands himself as having become the man she rejected because she rejected him and left. The maxim gives this painful account a shape: he asks whether he has done to himself and his fate what a bad name does to a dog, then concludes that the question is not really a question.

A remembered judgment becomes a prophecy

The expression’s force lies in the loop between naming and conduct. Pritchard does not describe himself as simply branded by another person: he actively preserves Mary’s judgment, treating it as an explanation of who he is. His father’s saying thus becomes self-indictment as well as warning. The remembered puppy, named by Pritchard, sharpens the irony: the person who once performed the naming now imagines himself trapped by a name of his own making.

At this moment, the maxim also frames Pritchard’s uncertainty about Anna Wetherell. He believes her claim that she did not intend suicide, yet her more than twelve hours of unconsciousness seem inexplicable to him as an accident; he considers whether someone drugged her or whether she is concealing the truth. The passage does not resolve that mystery. Instead, Pritchard’s private reflection on being fixed by an old judgment sits beside his effort to interpret Anna, where appearances and claims remain uncertain. The saying resonates as a warning about the lasting power of a verdict, even as the surrounding scene leaves the facts unsettled.