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The Island of Doctor Moreau

Name: The Island of Doctor Moreau
Author: H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

1896 · 19th Century · Novel · English

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Abstract

Written: Published 1896
Setting: 1887-1888; A small volcanic island in the Pacific; London
Author: H. G. Wells
Country: United Kingdom (Victorian Britain)
Language: English
Genre: Science fiction and horror
Form: Short novel, a first-person narrative with an editor's introduction
Recommended: Grades 9–12 (Animal vivisection, violent deaths and disturbing horror.)

Premise. A castaway is rescued at sea by a ship carrying caged animals and is put ashore on a remote island. Its master is a famous surgeon who fled London after his experiments on living animals became a public scandal.

Discovery. Screams from an enclosure send the narrator into the jungle, where he meets creatures that walk upright and speak but look like beasts. They recite commandments forbidding animal habits and dread the place where they were made.

The scientist's creed. The surgeon calmly explains that he reshapes animals into human form by cutting and grafting, and that he no longer cares about pain. Yet each creature drifts back toward its animal nature.

Collapse. A wounded puma kills the surgeon, his assistant dies in a drunken fight, and the narrator lives alone among the regressing creatures before escaping by sea. In London he sees beasts behind human faces.

For students. The book is a powerful case study in research ethics and in what makes a person human. It pairs well with Genesis, with Frankenstein and with debates on experimentation.

Reception. Reviewers in 1896 called it repulsive and even blasphemous, and the author later described it as a youthful theological grotesque. It appeared at the height of the anti-vivisection campaign.

Main characters

Edward Prendick: shipwrecked narrator
Dr. Moreau: exiled physiologist
Montgomery: drunken assistant
M'ling: servant creature
Sayer of the Law: leader of the Beast Folk

Portrait of H. G. Wells. Source · Public domain

Summary

The Island of Doctor Moreau is Wells's darkest scientific romance, a short horror novel about the attempt to make animals into men. It is presented as the account of Edward Prendick, an English gentleman with some training in biology, who is shipwrecked in the Pacific in 1887 and picked up by a schooner carrying a menagerie of animals and a drunken former medical student named Montgomery. Montgomery's strange servant, M'ling, has pointed ears and eyes that shine in the dark. The drunken captain throws Prendick off the ship at a small island, where Montgomery reluctantly takes him in. The island belongs to Dr. Moreau, a once-famous London physiologist driven out of England after a journalist exposed his cruel experiments in vivisection. Prendick hears the screams of a puma under the knife and flees into the jungle, where he meets grotesque, half-human creatures. He believes at first that Moreau is turning men into animals; in fact Moreau is carving animals into human shape through surgery, grafting and hypnotic suggestion. The Beast Folk live in a ravine and chant a Law taught by their Sayer of the Law: not to go on all fours, not to suck up drink, not to eat flesh or fish, not to claw bark of trees, not to chase other men; and they fear Moreau's 'House of Pain'. Moreau explains to Prendick that he is indifferent to pain and pursues only knowledge of the plasticity of living forms. But the creatures always revert. The puma escapes and kills Moreau; Montgomery, drunk, shares brandy with the Beast Folk and is killed in a brawl; the compound burns. Prendick lives alone among the creatures for ten months as they slowly regress to animal life, until he escapes in a drifting boat. Back in London, he cannot shake the sense that the people around him are beasts barely held in human form. Wells wrote the book as a 'theological grotesque', a parable about evolution, cruelty, and a creator without love. For Christian readers it raises strong questions about the image of God, the ethics of experiment, and the difference between law imposed by fear and law written on the heart.

Virtues in this work

Prudence: The novel warns against knowledge pursued without wisdom or limit.
Justice: It indicts cruelty to creatures in the name of science.

Plot or Argument

Chapters 1-7: Shipwreck and arrival
Prendick is rescued, quarrels with the drunken captain, and is set ashore on Moreau's island with Montgomery and his strange servant.
Chapters 8-13: The Beast Folk
Hearing the puma's screams, Prendick flees, meets the Beast Folk and hears the Law, and fears he will be made into an animal.
Chapters 14-16: Moreau explains
Moreau reveals that he shapes animals into men by surgery and describes his indifference to pain.
Chapters 17-22: Collapse
The puma kills Moreau, Montgomery dies, and Prendick lives among regressing creatures before escaping to England, haunted.

Characters

Edward Prendick, narrator
Shipwrecked gentleman with biological training.
Dr. Moreau, scientist
Brilliant, cold vivisector who carves animals into human shape.
Montgomery, assistant
Drunken former medical student, Moreau's helper.
M'ling, servant
Bear-dog creature devoted to Montgomery.
Sayer of the Law, Beast Folk leader
Grey creature who recites the Law.
Dog Man, companion
Faithful creature who follows Prendick.

Lessons

Knowledge without love
Moreau claims indifference to pain. Wells shows the cruelty of science cut off from compassion.
- How does Moreau justify his work?
- What limits should be placed on research?
Related across the library
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Lesson: Launce, Crab and the comedy of loyalty
  Launce, Crab and the comedy of loyalty. Launce weeps for a family and is ignored by a dog; he takes Crab's beating at the Duke's table as his own. The clown's loyalty to an unworthy companion parodies and quietly judges the gentlemen's quarrel. Shakespeare already uses prose comedy to say something the verse plot cannot.
- A Theologico-Political Treatise, Lesson: Freedom of thought and the peace of the state
  Freedom of thought and the peace of the state. Spinoza's central political claim is that a state is safest when it allows its citizens to think what they like and say what they think, punishing deeds rather than opinions. He argues that attempts to control thought teach people to dissemble, embitter honest people and strengthen faction. His defence of toleration belongs to the same century as Milton's Areopagitica and Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, though it rests on different grounds.
- Travels in Alaska, Lesson: Courage and care for a companion
  Courage and care for a companion. When Young falls on a mountain near Glenora and dislocates both arms, Muir does not abandon him but works him down the cliffs through the night. The episode shows that a love of adventure must be joined to responsibility for others.
- The Scarlet Letter, Summary
  The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father. Her husband, long absent and presumed lost, arrives under the name Roger Chillingworth and resolves to discover and torment the unknown man. That man...
- The Subjection of Women, Full Text
  all men now require to be eminently original it will be time enough to begin judging by experience of their capacity for originality It no doubt often happens that a person who has not widely and accurately studied the thoughts of others on a subject has by natural sagacity a happy intuition which he can suggest but cannot prove which yet when matured may be an important addition to knowledge but even then no justice can be done to it until some other person who does possess the previous acquirements takes it in...
Law and nature
The Beast Folk obey a Law out of fear, but their natures do not change.
- Why do the Beast Folk revert?
- Compare Jeremiah 31:33 and the law written on the heart.
Related across the library
- The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture I: Religion and Neurology
  Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic James caricatures reductive diagnosis before rejecting it as irrelevant to spiritual value.
- The Institutes of Justinian, Lesson: Three kinds of law
  Three kinds of law. Title II distinguishes natural law, the law of nations and civil law. The text admits tension between them: slavery comes from the law of nations yet is said to be against nature. Students see an ancient legal system naming a principle above its own practice.
- The Founding Documents, Lesson: Rights require interpretation
  Rights require interpretation. The Bill of Rights names freedoms but does not settle every conflict among them. Constitutional liberty becomes a continuing practice of argument.
- The Swiss Family Robinson, Lesson: Making a wilderness into a home
  Making a wilderness into a home. The family names landmarks, builds Falconhurst and Rockburg, plants gardens and keeps holidays. Home is shown as something a household builds and orders, not just a place it finds.
- The Mysterious Island, Lesson: Knowledge and work
  Knowledge and work. Harding shows that knowledge put to patient work can turn a wilderness into a home.
The image of God
Prendick returns home seeing beasts in human faces. The novel asks what makes humans truly human.
- What does Prendick fear at the end?
- What does Genesis 1:27 say about human dignity?
Related across the library
- A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Lesson: Test a word by the idea behind it
  Test a word by the idea behind it. Berkeley's Introduction holds that many disputes survive only because a word appears to name something no one can actually picture, such as a triangle of no particular kind. His method is to ask, of every key term, what particular idea it calls up. Even readers who reject immaterialism can use this habit in any argument.
- The Story of Philosophy, Lesson: Philosophy and science
  Philosophy and science. Durant describes philosophy as working on questions science has not yet settled. Students can test this account against examples.
- The Problems of Philosophy, Lesson: Why philosophy matters
  Why philosophy matters. In Chapter XV Russell answers the practical man who asks what philosophy is for. Its value, he argues, lies in freeing us from unexamined prejudice and in enlarging the self through contemplation of what is not the self.
- Philosophy of Natural Science, Lesson: The cost of an idea before its time
  The cost of an idea before its time. Semmelweis reasoned well and saved many lives, yet his conclusion was resisted for years. Hempel's chapter shows the method that led to the right answer; the history around it shows that method alone does not guarantee acceptance.
- On the Making of Man, Summary
  On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness. He treats the human being as a microcosm, joining intelligible and sensible creation. The upright posture, hands, senses, speech, mind, and capacity for contemp...

Context

The novel appeared during fierce Victorian debates about vivisection and evolution. Wells, Huxley's student, imagined the consequences of treating species as endlessly malleable.

Composition

Published by Heinemann in 1896 and condemned by many reviewers as blasphemous and horrifying.

Reception

Now regarded as a key early work of science fiction and of the ethics of experimentation; widely adapted.

Science / Knowledge Madness / Mind Animals Guilt Sin Identity Self Faith / Religion

Comparisons

Frankenstein
Another creator who makes living beings without love and suffers the consequences.
The Time Machine
Wells's first romance, also about human regression.
Gulliver's Travels
Swift's Houyhnhnms and Yahoos also blur the line between animal and human.

Quotes

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

— H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Ch. 12 (Project Gutenberg #159).Quote card

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, sections 43-44
Summary of the New Theory of Vision: distance is not seen directly but suggested by ideas of sight that have been joined with ideas of touch.
Freedom and the Law, Ch. IV, Freedom and the Certainty of the Law, p. 84
private Roman law was something to be described or to be discovered, not something to be enacted Leoni describes how the Roman jurisconsults developed private law without a legislature.
The Law, Opening
The law perverted! The first words of the pamphlet, announcing the charge that law has been turned to the opposite of its purpose.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses, Chaptbb Page
Charles Lenox Remond An Antislavery Discourse by Charles Lenox Remond The Auspicious Dawn of Negro Rule by Theodore Holly jK Union Speech by Frederick Douglass Men of Color to Arms by Frederick Douglass A Speech before the Paris Antislavery Conference August by J Sella Martin VII Deliberative Oratory Speeches of Negro Con gressmen The Negro s First Speech in Congress by John Willis Menard An Address before the United States Senate in Behalf of Admitting P B S Pinehback as Sen ator from Louisiana by B K Bruce CON...
The Mysterious Island, Lesson: Knowledge and work
Knowledge and work. Harding shows that knowledge put to patient work can turn a wilderness into a home.

“The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.”

— H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Ch. 14 (Project Gutenberg #159).Quote card

The Annals of Imperial Rome, People Of Britain Introduction
his admirable taste and to his practical knowledge of Roman eloquence of his own orations however not a single fragment has been left We know not whether Tacitus had children but the Emperor Tacitus who reigned in traced his genealogy to the Historian If we can prefer personal merit to accidental greatness Gibbon here observes we shall esteem the birth of Tacitus more truly noble than that of Kings He claimed his descent from the philosophic historian whose writings will instruct the last generations of mankind...
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, First Part
I dare almost affirm that a state of reflection is a state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal. In a passage on health and disease, Rousseau argues that most human ills come from social ways of living, not from nature.
Posterior Analytics and Physics, Physics II.8 (199a–b)
The doctor who pours out the wrong dose and the malformations of early creatures as failures of purposive effort; nature compared to a doctor doctoring himself.
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Lesson: A history told as a thought experiment
A history told as a thought experiment. Rousseau says plainly that his researches are hypothetical and conditional, not historical truths, and that Scripture describes the first man as never living in a state of nature. Readers should notice what such a conjectural history can show and what it cannot prove.
Rome: An Empire's Story, Lesson: Becoming Roman
Becoming Roman. A recurring theme is how people of many languages and traditions came to share a Roman identity through citizenship, cities and the cooperation of local leaders. Woolf's research specialty helps students see empire as something experienced and adopted from below as well as imposed from above.

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

The Law and how it is enforced.
Moreau's explanation of his methods.
Montgomery's relationship with the Beast Folk.
Prendick's state of mind in London.

Key terms and names

Vivisection: Surgery on living animals for research.
House of Pain: The Beast Folk's name for Moreau's laboratory.
Reversion: Return to an earlier, more animal state.
Sayer of the Law: Creature who recites the Law to the Beast Folk.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What does Prendick first believe Moreau is doing?
Comprehension How does Moreau die?
Interpretation Why do the Beast Folk revert?
Interpretation What does Wells suggest about a creator without love?
Interpretation Why is Prendick unable to live normally in London?
Big Question What makes a human being truly human?

Faith Connections

Genesis 1:27 (Scripture)
Humans are made in the image of God; the novel shows the horror of trying to manufacture humanity.
Proverbs 12:10 (Scripture)
A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast; Moreau's cruelty violates this.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Science pursued without compassion becomes cruelty, and human dignity cannot be made by force or surgery.

Rhetorical device: parable. The island is a closed world in which Moreau acts as a cruel creator and the Law parodies religious commandment.

Debate: Resolved: that Moreau's pursuit of knowledge was entirely unjustified.

Memory Work

Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Ch. 12. The chant that sums up the Beast Folk's borrowed humanity.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Compare Moreau and Victor Frankenstein as creators.

Comparison with Frankenstein: Compare the creators' responsibilities to their creatures.

Medical Lens

The novel is a classic literary treatment of vivisection and research ethics; it depicts surgery without consent, pain inflicted for knowledge, and alcoholism.

Anatomy Dissection Surgery Medical Ethics Pain Alcohol

Ch. 14
Moreau explains his methods of grafting and surgical reshaping.
Surgery Anatomy Dissection
Ch. 8-10
The screams of the puma under the knife.
Pain Medical Ethics
Ch. 19-20
Montgomery's drunken collapse.
Alcohol

Creative Prompts

Essay
Is Moreau a scientist or a false god? Argue from the text.
Dialogue
Write a debate between Moreau and a Christian physician on the ethics of experiment.
Classroom
Research the Victorian anti-vivisection movement and present its arguments.