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Edward Prendick, the only survivor of a shipwreck, is picked up by a ship carrying a cargo of animals and put ashore on a remote Pacific island. Its master…
Edward Prendick, the only survivor of a shipwreck, is picked up by a ship carrying a cargo of animals and put ashore on a remote Pacific island. Its master is Dr Moreau, a surgeon driven out of London years before when his cruel experiments on living animals were exposed. On the island he has carried them much further: in his 'House of Pain' he cuts and reshapes pumas, hyenas, apes and pigs into creatures that walk upright, speak and chant a Law that forbids them to go on all fours. Prendick discovers what lies in the jungle, and what happens when the Law begins to fail.
Context and significance
H. G. Wells, who had studied biology under Darwin's champion T. H. Huxley, published the novel in 1896, when vivisection and evolution were fiercely debated. Its reviewers called it horrifying, and it still raises hard questions about science without conscience and about how thin the line is between human and beast. It makes a dark companion to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and to Wells's own The Time Machine.
About the author
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was the son of a failing shopkeeper and a lady's maid, and worked as a draper's apprentice before winning a scholarship to study science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great defender. Between 1895 and 1901 he wrote the scientific romances that founded modern science fiction, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man among them.
He went on to write social novels, popular history such as A Short History of the World and books urging world government, met Lenin and Roosevelt, and imagined tanks, air war and the atomic bomb before they existed. Few writers have thought so hard about the future.