The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells, 1896

‘The Island of Dr Moreau’ is another example of the late Victorian fascination with the transformative powers of science. Written during an astonishingly productive period of creativity for Wells, when he also wrote the ‘Invisible Man‘, ‘War of the Worlds‘, and ‘The Time Machine‘, Wells draws heavily and widely on influences. Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels‘ is an obvious influence for example for the scenes at the end of the novel when the protagonist returns to the UK and has trouble to adjusting back to modern life after spending so long alone with the beasts on Moreau’s island:

When I lived in London the horror was well-nigh insupportable. I could not get away from men: their voices came through windows; locked doors were flimsy safeguards. I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me; furtive, craving men glance jealously at me; weary, pale workers go coughing by me with tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood; old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves; and, all unheeding, a ragged tail of gibing children... Particularly nauseous were the blank, expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone. And even it seemed that I too was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain which sent it to wander alone,

This is a mood, however, that comes to me now, I thank God, more rarely. I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and multitudes, and spend my days surrounded by wise books,—bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men. I see few strangers, and have but a small household. My days I devote to reading and to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. 

Wells is a great novelist of ideas, but he is also a wonderful and compelling storyteller. Here he builds the suspense and sense of horror slowly. The narrator, Edward Prendick, is rescued from a shipwreck, having survived in a small boat with two other passengers who at one point contemplate cannibalism, an early introduction to the idea of man as beast. His saviour is Montgomery,

“a youngish man with flaxen hair, a bristly straw-coloured moustache, and a dropping nether lip, was sitting and holding my wrist.…“Have some of this,” said he, and gave me a dose of some scarlet stuff, iced. It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger.”

Another hint of cannibalism here. Montgomery has a malformed assistant onboard, whose strangeness emerges slowly. At first it is his voice:

“I heard him in violent controversy with someone, who seemed to me to talk gibberish in response to him. The matter sounded as though it ended in blows, but in that I thought my ears were mistaken.”

Later Prendick sees him for the first time and is struck by his appearance. Something is obviously wrong:

“We left the cabin and found a man at the companion obstructing our way. He was standing on the ladder with his back to us, peering over the combing of the hatchway. He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders. He was dressed in dark-blue serge, and had peculiarly thick, coarse, black hair. I heard the unseen dogs growl furiously, and forthwith he ducked back,—coming into contact with the hand I put out to fend him off from myself. He turned with animal swiftness.”

Note how references to this man are always linked with the reactions of the caged dogs:

“In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a human mouth. His eyes were blood-shot at the edges, with scarcely a rim of white round the hazel pupils. There was a curious glow of excitement in his face.”

The narrator moves quickly from describing him as a man to a “creature”:

“I had paused half way through the hatchway, looking back, still astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced creature….The creature’s face was turned for one brief instant out of the dimness of the stern towards this illumination, and I saw that the eyes that glanced at me shone with a pale-green light. I did not know then that a reddish luminosity, at least, is not uncommon in human eyes. The thing came to me as stark inhumanity. That black figure with its eyes of fire struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind.”

When they arrive at (and are dumped unceremoniously on) the mysterious island, they meet some more mysterious, strangely shaped people:

“a strange crew they were. I saw only their faces, yet there was something in their faces—I knew not what—that gave me a queer spasm of disgust…. They seemed to me then to be brown men; but their limbs were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: . They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me,—faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen.” 

The astute reader will by now have come to understand that there is more to these strange people than meets the eye. But what? Prendick is not long on the island before he meets the mysterious Dr Moreau and discovers the purpose of his experiments:

“Yet surely, and especially to another scientific man, there was nothing so horrible in vivisection as to account for this secrecy; and by some odd leap in my thoughts the pointed ears and luminous eyes of Montgomery’s attendant came back again before me with the sharpest definition…

What could it all mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?”

What indeed? At first Prendick concludes that the experiments are intended to turn men into beasts, and suspects he may be the next victim.

“I was convinced now, absolutely assured, that Moreau had been vivisecting a human being… These creatures I had seen were the victims of some hideous experiment. These sickening scoundrels had merely intended to…fall upon me with a fate more horrible than death,—with torture; and after torture the most hideous degradation it is possible to conceive,—to send me off a lost soul, a beast.”

Montgomery and Moreau are finally able to persuade him that the reverse is the case, and that while their experiments may seem cruel, they are being done in a noble cause. The ethics of vivisection are never far below the surface in this horror story, but it is more than a simple campaigning novel. Wells initiates a discussion about what it is to be a man, and his relationship with the rest of the  natural world, from which (as Darwin had only just explained) we come and with which we share a common ancestry.

That is not to say that Wells pulls his punches on the horror of vivisection:

“There was blood, I saw, in the sink,—brown, and some scarlet—and I smelt the peculiar smell of carbolic acid. Then through an open doorway beyond, in the dim light of the shadow, I saw something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged; and then blotting this out appeared the face of old Moreau, white and terrible.”

Wells invites the reader to draw comparison between Moreau’s unnatural man-beasts, and the plight of the working man in Victorian industrial cities.

I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman’s vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.

This needs care – Wells is not suggesting that the working classes are beast-like, more that they have been treated as beasts of burden, and that doing so constantly might trigger the violent outbursts of anger and rejection of the law that Moreau’s man-beasts finally enjoy. The treatment of the animals on Moreau’s island can also be read as a critique of colonialism – Prendick initially assumes the man-beasts are ‘natives’ of some kind, and explains away their brutish appearance on this basis. European settlers and traders often treated indigenous people as animals, and even conducted social experiments aimed at ‘civilising’ them in the way Moreau does his beasts.

To finish, just a couple of other points: first, it is well known that Wells was politically progressive, and considered himself a socialist. There is a fleeting reminder of this when the narrator half-quotes Shelley’s ‘Masque of Anarchy’, where the implied reference to ‘rising like lions’ is particularly apposite:

“You who listen,” I cried, pointing now to Moreau and shouting past him to the Beast Men,—“You who listen! Do you not see these men still fear you, go in dread of you? Why, then, do you fear them? You are many—”

Second, consider these laws the animals are taught to maintain their obedience:

“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

“Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

“Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

I had never spotted before, nor seen it mentioned, but Orwell clearly drew inspiration from Wells here for his laws of animalism in ‘Animal Farm‘.