The Island of Doctor Moreau, A Possibility was written by H.G. Wells. Although Wells (1866-1946) is known today primarily for his science fiction, during his lifetime he was one of the most prolific, versatile, and popular writers in the English language.

Edward Prendick, an Englishman, is shipwrecked but is rescued by a ship bound for Noble’s Isle, an uncharted island. On the island Prendick meets Moreau. Prendick initially does not recall where he had heard the name before, but it eventually comes back to him: Moreau had to leave England because of his egregiously cruel experiments in vivisection. Prendick finds that Moreau and his assistant Montgomery are conducting experiments and creating creatures who are human-animal hybrids. Prendick assumes that Moreau is vivisecting humans and transforming them into animal-like creatures and runs away. In the wilds of the island Prendick encounters Moreau’s creations, the Beast Folk and learns something of their culture and laws: “Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law...not to suck up Drink; that is the Law.”¹ Moreau and Montgomery catch up to Prendick and manage to convince him that he is wrong and that Moreau is not turning humans into animals, but rather trying to do the reverse through anesthesia free vivisection in “the House of Pain.” Moreau and Montgomery are only intermittently successful, though, as the test subjects continue to revert to their base, animal natures. Eventually this catches up to Moreau, and he and Montgomery are killed in a revolt of the Beast Folk, who slowly revert to their animal natures once Moreau is dead. Prendick manages to escape and returns to England, but he becomes a recluse, finding that the humans he meets remind him of Moreau's subjects.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is one of Wells’ best-regarded works, and with good reason. It is a landmark of science fiction and of horror. Although the characterization is not the novel’s strength–the narrator is flat and colorless and Montgomery’s characterization is rather perfunctory–the character of Moreau is given enough life to become frighteningly real, even more than Wells could have imagined. The twenty-first century reader has a perspective on the Mad Scientist archetype which Wells could never have had. Modern readers are aware of Josef Mengele and Unit 731; Wells and the Victorians could only have seen such things as fantasies–possible fantasies, for the Victorians were not naïfs about the horrors men are capable of, but fantasies nonetheless. Modern readers will see aspects of Moreau which Wells perhaps never intended. Moreau’s values are a sadly recognizable to us, while to Wells and to his public Moreau would have been a product of horror literature, an updated version of Shelley’s Frankenstein rather than an all-too-real possibility.

As usual, Wells creates verisimilitude through the layering of homely details and the use of scientific terms and theories. Wells devotes a judicious amount of space to the Beast Folk, enough to make them seem real and inspire some pathos at their plight: they are neither animal nor man, in constant mental and physical pain, and the victims of a dispassionate sadist–but the reader is still left wanting to learn more about them. Although a few moments of antisemitism mar the novel, on the whole The Island of Dr. Moreau is an excellent examination of the horror and hubris of a truly mad scientist.

Among the largest of Moreau’s themes is Moreau’s attempt to circumvent and supersede evolution. Moreau ultimately wants to reform human nature, and is using the animals of the island as test subjects. Wells writes that Moreau

proceeded to point out that the possibilities of vivisection do not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily. In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas.²

Moreau, in his great pride, believes that he can duplicate God’s work: "But I will conquer yet. Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own!’"³ Moreau’s hubris is such that he sets himself up to the Beast Folk as God. Much of the rhetoric of Moreau and of the Law of the Beast Folk has echoes of the Book of Deuteronomy and Paradise Lost:

But Wells’ intent in drawing Moreau was not to present a mad scientist or even a negative moral lesson. Wells intended Moreau to be the hero of the novel. Wells expressed through Moreau some of his own views about eugenics and race, opinions which modern readers will find abhorrent. Wells said that The Island of Doctor Moreau offers “a novel definition of Education, which should be the careful and systematic manufacture of the artificial factor in man.”⁵ In another essay Wells wrote that the thesis of the novel is

the possibility of constructing a rational code of morality to meet the complex requirements of modern life...one may dream of an informal, unselfish, unauthorized body of workers, a real and conscious apparatus of education and moral suggestion, held together by a common faith and a common sentiment, and shaping the minds and acts destinies of men.⁶

Wells believed that the ends, in eugenics/racial terms, justified the means, and that Moreau’s ends–creating these workers–justified his immoral means.

The novel’s other primary theme is tied to the first. Moreau’s relationship to the Beast Folk is a deliberate parody of the Christian conception of God. Moreau is cruel to and capricious to the Beast Folk, as (in Wells’ view) God is cruel to man, and man worships God out of ignorance and fear (again, in Wells’ view) as the Beast Folk worship Moreau.

The Island of Doctor Moreau has provided critics and scholars with a surplus of material with which to comment on the novel. A full catalogue of critical reactions to the novel is not possible; the following are some of the most relevant.

the most Gothic of all Wells’s scientific romances. Wells generates Gothic atmosphere by playing the positions of the opposite sides in the late-Victorian vivisection controversy against each other, making both seem true at the same time…usually Wells’s fantasy supports a scientific world-view, but here his normative, scientifically-minded narrator falls apart in a story which gives the true voice of science to a Gothic dominator.⁷

a comprehensive analysis of the prevailing assumptions of science and the presumption of scientists…while drawing on earlier stereotypes of the scientist, Wells recasts and develops them in peculiarly modern terms, thereby introducing into the ethical debate occasioned by Darwinian theory implications which had not previously been recognized….⁸

an elegant variation on Frankenstein focusing less on the scientist’s capacity to unleash trouble than on his resemblance to God. Dr. Moreau's beast-people do not escape from his island to spread terror. But neither does he succeed in his God-like attempt to fashion them after his own-our own-human image. Even if they are taken as referring to evolution's blind alleys (perhaps including ourselves), and thus as a glance at Darwinian versions of creation, their regression to yahoolike bestiality is for readers less a transformation of scientific into aesthetic cognition than a disturbing theological allegory suggesting both human incapacity for attaining an ethical existence and God's inability to carry out his purposes.⁹

perhaps the first really totalitarian regime imagined by Western man…Wells is never more brilliant than in understanding the connection between romantic aspiration and tawdry, bestial, murderous practice that underlies so many twentieth-century totalitarianisms.¹⁰

And so on. The Island of Doctor Moreau richly deserves the label “classic.” It was written by Wells at the height of his powers, and consistently entertains.

Print: H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

¹ H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1921): 107.

² Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 132.

³ Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 144.

⁴ Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 108.

⁵ H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (Buffalo, NY: Broadview, 2009), 230.

⁶ H.G. Wells, “Morals and Civilization,” in H.G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes, eds. (Berkeley: University of California, 1975), 227.

⁷ Mason Harris, “Vivisection, the Culture of Science, and Intellectual Uncertainty in The Island of Doctor Moreau,” Gothic Studies 4, no. 2 (Nov. 2002): 99.

⁸ R.D. Haynes, “The Unholly Alliance of Science in The Island of Doctor Moreau,” The Wellsian 11 (Summer 1998): 13.

⁹ Paul K. Alkon, Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 47.

¹⁰ Frank McConnell, The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells (Oxford: Oxford University, 1981), 92.