The Island of Dr. Moreau (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By H.G. Wells and Darren Harris-Fain

When first published, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) shocked and horrified most of its readers and reviewers. Wells effectively employs disturbing elements to explore both the implications of evolutionary theory and to satirize modern societys religious institutions and its pride in its "civilization" - all through a story filled with suspense and adventure, capable of being read in a single page-turning sitting.

As with the other early "scientific romances" that initiated Wells literary career, The Island of Dr. Moreau successfully integrates serious ideas into a story driven not only by fast-paced action but also by Wells gift for placing the fantastic parts of the story in the realistically depicted world of his audience. Thus Wells offered the growing field of science fiction an important model as well as one of its most highly regarded examples.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428904

H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells is considered by many to be the father of science fiction. He was the author of numerous classics such as The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds, and many more. 

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

LATE IN HIS LIFE H. G. WELLS DESCRIBED HIS EARLY NOVEL The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) as an exercise in youthful blasphemy, and its initial publication shocked and horrified most of its first readers and reviewers. Indeed, the novel is shocking and horrifying, but the older Wells underestimated the book after its hostile reception in 1896 calling it unlucky. Instead, in The Island of Dr. Moreau Wells effectively employs disturbing elements both to explore the implications of evolutionary theory and to satirize modern society’s religious institutions and its pride in its civilization—all through a story filled with suspense and adventure, capable of being read in a single page-turning sitting. As with the other early scientific romances that initiated Wells’ literary career, The Island of Dr. Moreau successfully integrates serious ideas into a story driven not only by fast-paced action but also by Wells’ gift for placing the fantastic parts of the story in the realistically depicted world of his audience. Thus in The Island of Dr. Moreau as well as his other early scientific romances, Wells offered the growing field of science fiction an important model as well as some of its most highly regarded examples.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) hardly had the type of background one would expect of someone who became one of the most successful and frequently discussed writers of his time. Born in Bromley, Kent, a suburb of London, to a housekeeper and a gardener and sometime cricket player, Wells in his childhood found his voracious quest for knowledge thwarted by his parents’ financial limitations and their desire to place him in gainful apprenticeships. In his teens he began his education in earnest, showing a particular interest in science. But Wells also harbored literary ambitions, publishing essays and stories and even science textbooks while eking out a living as a teacher until he could survive on the products of his prolific pen. His first major success came before he was thirty: The Time Machine (1895), the first of his scientific romances. Like this novel, his second scientific romance, The Island of Dr. Moreau, drew upon Wells’ scientific training to present a literary work that took speculative ideas and made them real. He did so both to entertain his readers and to make them think—especially to reconsider their smug assurance in their culture’s achievements and in their belief that they had transcended their animal natures as the zenith of evolutionary development. Thus The Island of Dr. Moreau is consistent with most of Wells’ other writings, concerned with both engaging readers and educating them.

Many critics have faulted Wells for growing increasingly concerned with educating his readers and becoming less interested in entertaining them as his career developed. Although in his early career he befriended such writers as Henry James and Joseph Conrad and at times espoused views about the novel as art similar to theirs, and although Wells certainly had aspirations for his scientific romances higher than other scientific romances being published in England at the same time, for the most part Wells increasingly saw his writing, both fiction and nonfiction, as a means toward an end rather than an end in itself. This end, as he himself admitted, involved both educating his readers and critiquing the scientific, social, and political views of his day. Thus if one chronologically scans the dozens of titles Wells published in his lengthy career as a writer, one sees an increasing number of nonfiction titles as his career advanced and a decreasing number of novels and story collections. Similarly, if one explores only the fiction, one notices that the works become more and more absorbed with issues such as the institution of marriage, women’s roles, and political ideas.

To some extent this tendency is foreshadowed in even the earliest of Wells’ novels, especially the scientific romances for which he remains best known: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and The First Men in the Moon (1901). While none of these is as deliberate in its discussion of ideas as most of his later novels would become, nonetheless all of them are not only exciting science-fiction stories but also infused with meditations upon science, particularly its uses and abuses. Also, many of them comment on social and political ideas.

Of course, Wells’ inspiration for The Island of Dr. Moreau is more complex than an inclination to write about ideas in his fiction. Just as Dr. Moreau creates hybrids of animals in some of his grisly experiments, so Wells here combines a number of different concepts and conceits to create something entirely unique. For one, obviously much of the main idea of The Island of Dr. Moreau stems from the contemporary debate over vivisection (surgery upon a living being), which at the time was quite intense. Dr. Moreau is, strictly speaking, a vivisectionist, though one utterly unlike any of Wells’ day. This difference comes from Wells’ combination of the theme of vivisection with another idea, which could have come from a wide array of sources—that of experimenting upon animals to make them something radically different from what they were. One possible source could be any number of fantastic works in which animals are in various ways given human qualities, whether by magic or by divine intervention, as in the case of Balaam’s ass in the Bible, Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, beast fables, and mythology. The difference here parallels Wells’ intent in The Time Machine: to take a fantastic trope, such as time travel or metamorphosis, and present it not as happening by magic or some other fantastic means but as occurring in ways that are made to seem scientifically plausible. Thus the metamorphosis of Moreau’s Beast Folk occurs not by supernatural means but under the scalpel. The inspiration thus involves taking the fantastic trope of animal metamorphosis and rendering it in science-fiction terms. Related to this is one of the literary inspirations for the novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 1831). Both Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau create human beings from parts of other beings; the difference is that Frankenstein uses corpses, while Moreau uses animals. Other literary echoes include William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, John Milton’s Comus, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and especially Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), with its treatment of humanity’s dual nature.

Yet its underlying ideas make The Island of Dr. Moreau more complex than a simple combination of various literary sources and scientifically reinterpreted myth. Related to Wells’ combination of animal transformation and vivisection is the theory of evolution, hotly debated in England and elsewhere following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Wells’ lifelong lack of sympathy for traditional religious beliefs and his scientific training readily led him to accept evolution as scientific fact, and he was especially impressed as a student by the views of his teacher T. H. Huxley (1825-1895). Huxley, who earned the nickname Darwin’s bulldog for his tenacious defense of evolutionary theory, derided the popular notion held by many in the late nineteenth century that humanity represented the pinnacle of evolutionary development. Instead, Huxley argued, there was no guarantee that humanity would either remain as it was or continue as the dominant species on the planet. Nature, he argued, simply forced species to try to survive or face extinction; it had no notions of progress. Such ideas were a major influence on The Time Machine, in which Wells presented two different human species of the far future, neither as intellectually developed as humanity in 1895, and in the further future the Time Traveler finds that humanity has become extinct.

Similarly, in The Island of Dr. Moreau Wells, influenced by Huxley, suggests that for all their pride in their status among the other animals and in their civilization, humans are not as high and mighty as they would like to think. For one thing, the novel suggests, human beings are not all that different from the Beast Folk. We too are animals, Wells reminds us, as he presents us with a number of human characters who variously act in beastly ways. For all our civilization, Wells says, we are not far removed from our lower kin. As Wells explained in his preface to the novel in the 1924 Atlantic Edition of his collected works, humanity is in perpetual conflict between instinct and injunction. Just as Dr. Moreau’s Beast Folk revert to their animal natures, Wells suggests that the same could apply to human beings—that our civilized veneers are mere masks hiding the beasts we could so easily become. Even if those aspects of humanity that separate us from the other animals are more ingrained, the novel suggests, there is no guarantee that the human race will forever retain this higher nature. In the Beast Folk’s regression is a possible warning of our own fate, echoing the more explicit message of The Time Machine.

As if to drive the point home, Wells returns his protagonist, the shipwrecked Prendick, a former student of Huxley’s who has witnessed Moreau’s experiments and their consequences, to England a changed man—not changed so much physically, as he had at first feared, but in the way he views his fellow human beings. Now he no longer sees them as simply human—the animal in them shows through. Only in books can Prendick regain the sense of humanity’s superior spark of something that transcends its animal origins.

The conclusion of The Island of Dr. Moreau thus echoes that of one of Wells’ major literary influences, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In Swift’s novel, Lemuel Gulliver, whose last adventure had landed him among the rational equestrian Houyhnhnms and the seemingly human yet animalistic Yahoos, also returns to England a changed man, seeing his fellow human beings as beastly and trying instead to talk to the horses. (A similar ending, incidentally, occurs in Wells’ friend Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published just a few years after The Island of Dr. Moreau.) Medieval maps often marked the terra incognita of the Atlantic with the phrase, Here there be monsters, which Wells makes a reality, yet he also reminds us that England is also an island, and the monsters are among us even in the civilized world.

Wells freely admitted that Swift was a major influence on his work, and he especially admired both Swift’s gift for satire and his desire to expose human folly in hopes of improving society. While Wells would later focus on the latter goal, certainly Swiftian satire is present in The Island of Dr. Moreau—especially in the satirical treatment of the Beast Folk’s religious reverence of Moreau, who assumes a godlike status among his creations, and in the Law given to them, which parodies not only religious laws such as the Ten Commandments but also the Law of the Jungle in Rudyard Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book (1895).

Some critics have also seen the novel as an allegory of colonialism.

Additionally, the novel ridicules a romantic view of nature expressed by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that in a state of nature humanity was essentially perfect, and that it was civilization that corrupted their natural dignity. From an evolutionary standpoint, Wells would have seen Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage as patently absurd. People are naturally more like the animals from which we evolved, Wells would have said, savage or not—and the idea that Wells may have been responding to Rousseau’s brand of romanticism is suggested in the fact that Moreau’s island, which Wells invented and placed near the Galapagos Islands that Darwin investigated, is ironically named Noble’s Isle.

For all of this richness of ideas, the initial readers and reviewers of The Island of Dr. Moreau for the most part failed to see the novel as satirical or to view it as anything other than a compendium of horrors. As Ingvald Raknem explains, Wells’ earlier works evoked … a sympathetic response because most of them were pleasantly satirical, agreeable, and amusing, whereas The Island of Dr. Moreau outraged the critics’ sense of propriety. The atrocities of Dr. Moreau disgusted them, and blinded them to any merits in the book. The negative critical verdict was almost unanimous, with only a few reviewers writing that the novel possessed any artistic qualities. However, the novel did find a few appreciative readers, and as time passed three things happened to preserve the book from literary oblivion. First, Wells’ next two scientific romances, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, were both popular and critical successes, thus ensuring Wells a continued audience who might come back to The Island of Dr. Moreau with a different perspective. Second, critics decades later began to look past the horrors depicted in the novel to Wells’ purposes in presenting them, thus leading to a reevaluation of the book. Finally, in the early to mid-1900s, Wells was adopted by an emerging science-fiction community, many of whom read his early scientific romances reprinted in pulp magazines, as one of the parents of the genre, whose works—among them The Island of Dr. Moreau—laid the foundations for the field. Thus the work today has two different critical rankings: in academic circles Wells’ early scientific romances, including The Island of Dr. Moreau, are generally accepted as his most noteworthy works, and while they may not be granted the canonical status of the better work of contemporaries such as James and Conrad, they are considered worth reading and studying. In contrast, in the science-fiction community The Island of Dr. Moreau and its companions from Wells’ early career are considered classics, widely regarded as among the greatest works of the genre. So despite its shaky start, The Island of Dr. Moreau has endured.

Moreover, The Island of Dr. Moreau has served as an inspiration for several other literary works as well as adaptations on the stage and screen. In addition to a few