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Scholarly Editions: H.G. Wells' The Island
of Doctor Moreau - Annotated with an Introduction
Excerpt
from the Introduction
About
The Island of Doctor Moreau
Critical
Reaction and Editorial Changes
Although
Wells was investigating class structures and the Darwinian fate
of humanity in The Time Machine, and expanding on the eventual
demise of earthly life, that telling inspired less vociferous
outcry than his The Island of Doctor Moreau. The fate of
the Eloi and the Morlocks was comfortably far in the future, and
the implications of their situation vague enough to be ignored
by those who merely wanted to enjoy a rousing tale.
The
Island of Doctor Moreau evoked an entirely different
reaction. Although the story is distanced from the reader by its
placement as a found text, voiced by an observer rather than the
perpetrator of the experimentation, and set on a distant tropical
island, Wells’ observations about the most uncomfortable implications
of Darwin’s theory of evolution—that “Man [. . .] is the same
fearing, snarling, fighting beast he was a hundred thousand years
ago” (See excerpt from The Croquet Player in Appendix 6)—caused
an immediate outcry when it was published.
Wells said
that such books as his scientific romances are ones which “hold
the reader to the end by art and illusion and not by proof and
argument, and the moment he closes the cover and reflects he wakes
up to their impossibility” (“Preface”, in Seven Famous Novels.
See Appendix 1). Moreau’s scientific impossibility
was the least of the problems according to the critics of the
time. Contemporaneous reviews were universally critical,
excepting a “reasonably just” (Bergonzi 99) reviewer in the Guardian
who, as Wells says, “seemed to be the only one who read it aright,
and who therefore succeeded in giving a really intelligent notice
of it” (ibid 98). As Bergonzi notes, “[s]ome reviewers were so
horrified by what they considered the blatant sensationalism of
the novel that they were quite unable to consider its literary
merits” (97). Reviewers either damned the novel for its “exceedingly
ghastly” (Parrinder 52) “greed of cheap horrors” (ibid 45), claimed
that it “achieved originality at the expense of decency” (ibid
50), argued that the “sufferings inflicted in the course of the
story have absolutely no adequate artistic reason” (ibid 51),
or heaped ridicule on its science:
Doctor
Moreau is himself a cliché from the pages of an anti-vivisection
pamphlet. [. . .] a multitude of experiments on the skin and bone
grafting and on transfusion of blood shows that animal-hybrids
cannot be produced in these fashions. You can transfuse blood
or graft skin from one man to another; but attempts to combine
living material from different creatures fail. (Parrinder 46)
Wells’
response to Chalmers Mitchell’s claim in the Saturday Review
that his science was unfounded references an article from
the British Medical Journal from 31 October, 1896, which
“contains the report of a successful graft, of not merely connective
but of nervous tissue between a rabbit and a man” (Correspondence).
The
difference in the contemporaneous reaction to The Time Machine
and Moreau is instructive, at least in terms of the
preoccupations of Victorian society. Although some reviewers imply
that Wells was flirting with sexual indecency (Bergonzi 97), in
fact, beyond the suggestion that some of the beast women became
promiscuous when they reverted to being animals, the novel did
not deal in sexual matters. The “extremely precocious, physically
at least” Eloi “running in their amorous sport” caused much less
dismay, but Wells likely sensed that references to such behaviour
in his beast folk might be too controversial for his audience.
Even the faint suggestion of the beast animals’ reversion is unseemly
enough that the timid narrator spares the reader its details:
They
were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.
Some
of them—the pioneers in this, I noticed with some surprise, were
all females—began to disregard the injunction of decency, deliberately
for the most part. Others even attempted public outrages upon
the institution of monogamy. The tradition of the Law was clearly
losing its force. I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject.
The reaction
to Moreau had much less to do with the vivid and gory detail
with which Wells made his argument than the notion that the troubling
differences between humans and the other animals are merely skin
deep. This is alluded to in the implications of Darwin’s work,[1] and certainly Huxley had toppled humanity from its self-appointed
pedestal on the earthly pyramid, but Victorian society was still
unready for such a suggestion come to life.
Unwilling
to let the disconcerted Victorian sensibility alone, Wells also,
and this was noted by an anonymous reviewer in the Guardian,
“seems to parody the work of the Creator of the human race, and
cast contempt upon the dealings of God with His creatures” (Bergonzi
98). By casting Moreau in the role of “a nightmarish caricature
of the Almighty” (ibid 106) who argues that our humanity is maintained
by following memorized and rather arbitrary rules which we will
continually break, Wells makes Moreau a deity that the beast in
us would rather avoid or kill.
Although even
Wells seems to have been dismayed by the bleak vision of the novel,
he also considered it to be his best work to date, and was happy
enough with its central tenet that in its reworking over the next
thirty years,[2] Prendick, Moreau, the beast people, and the saying of the Law
remained the same. The changes he made to the novel served to
excise characters which distract from the main plot, such as Moreau’s
“wife and son in Wells’s earlier drafts” (Shelton 7): “those thematically
extraneous figures are dropped from the final and far superior
version, so that its Moreau is sterile and childless but for the
creatures he, like Frankenstein, fashions in a laboratory with
his own hands” (ibid).[3] Wells also discarded those portions of Prendick’s initial meetings
with the beast folk which align their bestial nature with alcohol
abuse (Philmus xxii). Originally he has a “piggish looking man”
tell Prendick of a place “where they let you drink out of saucers”
and “you can go about on all fours” (Philmus xix-xx). This “temperance
tract” (ibid) type of evaluation of the animalistic flaunting
of the Law is later changed to the alcoholism of Captain Davies
from the Lady Vain, Montgomery’s incident in London on
a foggy night, and his final “Bank Holiday.” Wells also shifted
the setting of the novel from an idyllic South
Seas isle to a lonely stretch of open ocean near the
Galapagos. This moves the novel away from mere adventure and allows
it to be associated with Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle. Wells also removed,
or modified the explicit racism of the original draft. The “black
woman sprawled [. . .] with much of the abandon of a well-fed
dog,” the “yellow men,” and the “wizened brown negroid face” (Philmus
xxii) leave only a few traces in the final copy.
[1] “Darwin,
having put an end once and for all to the Biblical legend, closed
the gap between man and animated nature” (Kagarlitski 51).
[2] The various editions of Wells’ novel include “the original English
edition, put out by William Heinemann in April of 1896 but based
on a copy-text which that publisher presumably got no later
than August 1895; the first American edition, which the firm
of Stone and Kimball printed in May 1896 and issued in August
of that year; and the T. Fisher Unwin/Charles Scribner’s ‘Atlantic
Edition’ of 1924, which paired Moreau with The Sleeper
Awakes in the second of twenty-eight volumes collecting
most of the fiction and some of the nonfiction that Wells had
committed to print by 1924” (Philmus xxxii).
[3] Even the references to Frankenstein are dropped from the subsequent
drafts: “From the (deleted) references to ‘Frankenstein’ in
the opening chapter, we can be quite certain that Wells had
it in mind to expressly compare Moreau’s revival of Prendick
with the animation of a corpse by Shelley’s ‘mad scientist’”
(Philmus xix).
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