‘An Infernally Rum Place’: The Island of Doctor Moreau and Degeneration

Abstract

The Island of Doctor Moreau was first written in 1895; through subsequent revisions Wells transformed a relatively conventional adventure narrative into a disconcerting evolutionary fable which offended critical sensibilities following its publication in April 1896. Basil Williams, in a review in Athenaeum, found that: ‘The sufferings inflicted in the course of the story have absolutely no adequate artistic reason, for it is impossible to feel the slightest interest in any one of the characters, who are used as nothing but groundwork on which to paint the horrors.’² Similarly, the author of an unsigned notice in the Review of Reviews warned that ‘the frontispiece alone of his [Wells’s] new story is enough to keep it out of circulation’.³ The conservative tone of such reviews is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that Wells’s second scientific romance was published in the climate of moral suppression which followed the Wilde trials of April and May 1895. Writing in 1924, Wells acknowledged the trials as a partial inspiration for the novel:

There was a scandalous trial about that time, the graceless and pitiful downfall of a man of genius, and this story was the response of an imaginative mind to the reminder that humanity is but animal rough-hewn to a reasonable shape and in perpetual internal conflict between instinct and injunction.⁴

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)¹