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The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. The text of the novel is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat. He is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The novel deals with a number of themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, human interference with nature, and the effects of trauma.[2] Wells described it as "an exercise in youthful blasphemy."[3]

For other uses, see The Island of Doctor Moreau (disambiguation).

Author

H. G. Wells

United Kingdom

Science fiction

1896 (Heinemann (UK); Stone & Kimball (US)[1])

The Island of Doctor Moreau at Wikisource

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a classic work of early science fiction[4] and remains one of Wells's best-known books. The novel is the earliest depiction of the science fiction motif "uplift" in which a more advanced race intervenes in the evolution of an animal species to bring the latter to a higher level of intelligence.[5] It has been adapted to film and other media on many occasions.[6]

Edward Prendick – The narrator and protagonist

Dr. Moreau – A vivisectionist who has fled upon his experiments being exposed and has moved to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean to pursue his research of perfecting his Beast Folk

mad

Montgomery – Dr. Moreau's assistant and Prendick's rescuer. A physician who enjoyed a measure of happiness in England, he is an who feels some sympathy for the Beast Folk.

alcoholic

Reception[edit]

Contemporary reviews disputed Wells' belief that vivisection could create any of the monsters found in the book.[10] It has been rated almost 117,000 times on Goodreads, with an average rating of 3.73 out of 5.[11]

's 1908 French novel Le Docteur Lerne, sous-dieu was inspired by The Island of Doctor Moreau, and dedicated to H. G. Wells by its author.

Maurice Renard

In 's novel Heart of a Dog (1925) a Moscow surgeon Dr. Preobrazhensky transplants human organs into the body of homeless dog. As a result, the animal transforms into the man, Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov. In the end of the novel Preobrazhensky undergoes another operation to return him to the dog's state.

Mikhail Bulgakov

The title figure in Argentinian writer novel The Invention of Morel (1940), a scientific genius of questionable morality, alludes to Wells's Moreau.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

In chapter 1 of 's novel Lizard Music (1976), Victor watches a late-night film on TV which is identified in chapter 2 as The Island of Dr Morbo.

Daniel Pinkwater

Moreau's Other Island (1980) by is an updating of the original to a near-future setting. US Under-Secretary of State Calvert Madle Roberts is cast ashore on the eponymous island where he discovers the cyborgised Thalidomide victim Mortimer Dart carrying on Moreau's work. It transpires that Dart's work is intended to produce a 'replacement' race that can survive a post-nuclear environment, and that Roberts approved Dart's funding.

Brian Aldiss

JLA: Island of Dr. Moreau (2002) is a one-shot tale where Dr. Moreau creates an animal version of the . As in the novel they start returning to their animal behavior.

Justice League

(2002) by Ann Halam is a loose adaptation of the story, in which the eponymous scientist performs transgenic experiments upon the narrator and two other survivors of a plane crash, transforming them into mostly-animal hybrids.

Dr. Franklin's Island

In (2011) by Ben Aaronovitch, the investigation into the Faceless Man uncovers a deserted sex parlor which the malign wizard's predecessor had operated in the 1970s. Upon learning that it had specialized in magically-altered human "chimeras" with animalistic features, Peter nicknames it the "Strip Club of Dr. Moreau".

Moon Over Soho

(2012) by Guy Adams puts Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson on the trail of several of the hybrids on the loose in London.

Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau

The Madman's Daughter trilogy (2013) by Megan Shepherd tells the story of Dr. Moreau's daughter Juliet. Each book is based on a different classic novel: the first book is based on this novel by Wells, the second one on 's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and the final book is based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).[12]

Robert Louis Stevenson

In chapter 61 of (2013), book five of Charlie Higson's post-apocalyptic horror series, The Enemy, the expedition party from the museum encounters a strange set of malformed children at the biomedical company Promithios, who recite the Litany of the Law.[13]

The Fallen

The Isles of Dr Moreau (2015) in 's short story collection Daydreams of Angels tells of a grandfather who, when he was young, meets an eccentric, albeit humane scientist named Dr Moreau on "the Isle of Noble and Important and Respectable Betterment of Homo sapiens and Their Consorts". Moreau's experiments involve combining animal DNA with human DNA and the story unfolds as the grandfather meets (and dates) several of these humanoid creatures.[14]

Heather O'Neill

In Chapter 76 (2016), Greek goddess Aphrodite is reading a book with the title The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Wonder Woman

(2017) by Theodora Goss features the half-finished puma woman from The Island of Dr Moreau as one of its main characters, Catherine.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter

(2022) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a novel billed as "a dreamy reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Mexico."[15]

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Scientific plausibility[edit]

In the short essay "The Limits of Individual Plasticity" (1895), H.G. Wells expounded upon his firm belief that the events depicted in The Island of Doctor Moreau are entirely possible should such vivisective experiments ever be tested outside the confines of science fiction. Until recently, modern medicine has shown that non-human animals lack the necessary brain structure to emulate human faculties like speech. In addition, immune responses to foreign tissues make transplantation within one species very complicated, let alone between species. However, a team of researchers at Stanford University have successfully transplanted a cluster of living human brain cells from a dish in the lab to the brain of a newborn rat to study neurological conditions such as autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia.[27]

Canadas, Ivan. "Going Wilde: Prendick, Montgomery and Late-Victorian Homosexuality in The Island of Doctor Moreau." JELL: Journal of the English Language and Literature Association of Korea, 56.3 (June 2010): 461–485.

Hoad, Neville. “Cosmetic Surgeons of the Social: Darwin, Freud, and Wells and the Limits of Sympathy on The Island of Dr. Moreau”, in: Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, Ed. Lauren Berlant. London & New York: Routledge, 2004. 187–217.

Reed, John R., “The Vanity of Law in The Island of Doctor Moreau”, in: H. G. Wells under Revision: Proceedings of the International H. G. Wells Symposium: London, July 1986, Ed. Patrick Parrinder & Christopher Rolfe. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP / London and Toronto: Associated UPs, 1990. 134-44.

Wells, H. G. The Island of Dr. Moreau, Ed. Steven Palmé. Dover Thrift Editions. New York: Dover Publications, 1996.

Wells, H. G. The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Critical Text of the 1896 London First Edition, with Introduction and Appendices, Ed. Leon Stover. The Annotated H.G. Wells, 2. Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 1996.

at Standard Ebooks

The Island of Doctor Moreau

at Project Gutenberg

The Island of Doctor Moreau

at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions)

The Island of Doctor Moreau

public domain audiobook at LibriVox

The Island of Doctor Moreau

A draft of the 1996 films screenplay, dated 26 April 1994

at IMDb

The Island of Lost Souls (1932)

at IMDb

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)

at IMDb

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

Jörg, Daniele (2003). "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—Dr. Moreau Goes to Hollywood". Public Understanding of Science. 12 (3): 297–305. :10.1177/0963662503123008. S2CID 143920149. Compares the three adaptations of the novel, focuses on the scientists and the science in the film, considering the year of the production and what was known about genes and cells at the time.

doi

Analysis of The Island of Dr. Moreau on Lit React