H G Wells Omnibus, page 138
The Secret Places of the Heart (1922) novel
Men Like Gods: A Novel (1923) novel
The Story of a Great Schoolmaster: Being a Plain Account of the Life and Ideas of Sanderson of Oundle (1924) nonfiction
The Dream: A Novel (1924) novel
Christina Alberta’s Father (1925) novel
The World of William Clissold: A Novel at a New Angle (1926) novel
Meanwhile: A Picture of a Lady (1927) novel
Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928) novel
The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928) nonfiction
The King Who Was a King: The Book of a Film (1929) novel
The Autocracy of Mr. Parham: His Remarkable Adventures in This Changing World (1930) novel
The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and Its Possibilities (1931) nonfiction, with Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells
The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) nonfiction
The Bulpington of Blup: Adventures, Poses, Stresses, Conflicts, and Disaster in a Contemporary Brain (1932) novel
The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (1933) novel
Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (1934) nonfiction
The Anatomy of Frustration: A Modern Synthesis (1936) nonfiction
The Croquet Player: A Story (1936) novel
Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia (1937) novel
Brynhild (1937) novel
The Camford Visitation (1937) novel
Apropos of Dolores (1938) novel
World Brain (1938) nonfiction
The Brothers: A Story (1938) novel
The Holy Terror (1939) novel
The Fate of Man: An Unemotional Statement of the Things That Are Happening to Him Now, and of the Immediate Possibilities Confronting Him (1939) nonfiction
Babes in the Darkling Wood (1940) novel
All Aboard for Ararat (1940) novel
You Can’t Be Too Careful: A Sample of Life, 1901-1951 (1941) novel
Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (1943) nonfiction
’42 to ’44: A Contemporary Memoir upon Human Behavior During the Crisis of the World Revolution (1944) nonfiction
Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) nonfiction
BOOKS FOR FURTHER READING
Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1961.
Huntington, John. The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
MacKenzie, Norman and Jeanne. H. G. Wells: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.
McConnell, Frank. The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Smith, David C. H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
Wagar, W. Warren. H. G. Wells and the World State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961.
Wells, H. G. The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance: A Critical Text of the 1897 New York First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices, ed. Leon Stover. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1998.
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
H. G. WELLS, the third son of a small shopkeeper, was born in Bromley in 1866. After two years’ apprenticeship in a draper’s shop, he became a pupil-teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and won a scholarship to study under T. H. Huxley at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He taught biology before becoming a professional writer and journalist. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories and programmes for world regeneration.
Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. His prophetic imagination was first displayed in pioneering works of science fiction such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Later he became an apostle of socialism, science and progress, whose anticipations of a future world state include The Shape of Things to Come (1933). His controversial views on sexual equality and women’s rights were expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). He was, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘an important liberator of thought and action’.
Wells drew on his own early struggles in many of his best novels, including Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). His educational works, some written in collaboration, include The Outline of History (1920) and The Science of Life (1930). His Experiment in Autobiography (2, 1934) reviews his world. He died in London in 1946.
PATRICK PARRINDER took his MA and Ph.D. at Cambridge University, where he held a Fellowship at King’s College and published his first two books on Wells, H. G. Wells (1970) and H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (1972). He has been Chairman of the H. G. Wells Society and editor of the Wellsian, and has also written on James Joyce, science fiction, literary criticism and the history of the English novel. His book Shadows of the Future (1995) brings together his interests in Wells, science fiction and literary prophecy. Since 1986 he has been Professor of English at the University of Reading.
MARGARET ATWOOD was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her thirty years of writing, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, fiction and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid’s Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin, which won the 2000 Booker Prize. Her latest work of non-fiction, Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing, was published in 2002 and in April 2003, her eleventh novel, the Man Booker Prize-nominated Oryx and Crake, was released to great acclaim. Her work has been published in more than thirty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
STEVEN MCLEAN has recently completed his Ph.D. in the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His thesis investigates the relationship between H. G. Wells’s scientific romances and the discourses of science in the 1890s and early 1900s. Steven has published on Wells’s early fiction. He is the current Secretary of the H. G. Wells Society.
H. G. WELLS
The Island of Doctor Moreau
Edited by PATRICK PARRINDER
With an Introduction by MARGARET ATWOOD
and Notes by STEVEN MCLEAN
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1896
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2005
5
Text copyright © the Literary Executors of the Estate of H. G. Wells
Biographical Note, Further Reading, Note on the Text copyright © Patrick Parrinder, 2005
Introduction copyright © Margaret Atwood, 2005
Notes copyright © Steven McLean, 2005
All rights reserved
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CONTENTS
Biographical Note
Introduction
Further Reading
Note on the Text
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
Notes
Biographical Note
Herbert George Wells was born on 21 September 1866 at Bromley, Kent, a small market town soon to be swallowed up by the suburban growth of outer London. His father, formerly a professional gardener and a county cricketer renowned for his fast bowling, owned a small business in Bromley High Street selling china goods and cricket bats. The house was grandly known as Atlas House, but the centre of family life was a cramped basement kitchen underneath the shop. Soon Joseph Wells’s cricketing days were cut short by a broken leg, and the family fortunes looked bleak.
Young ‘Bertie’ Wells had already shown great academic promise, but when he was thirteen, his family broke up and he was forced to earn his own living. His father was bankrupt, and his mother left home to become resident housekeeper at Uppark, the great Sussex country house where she had worked as a lady’s maid before her marriage. Wells was taken out of school to follow his two elder brothers into the drapery trade. After serving briefly as a pupil-teacher and a pharmacist’s assistant, in 1881 he was apprenticed to a department store in Southsea, working a thirteen-hour day and sleeping in a dormitory with his fellow-apprentices. This was the unhappiest period of his life, though he would later revisit it in comic romances such as Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Kipps and Polly both manage to escape from their servitude as drapers, and in 1883, helped by his long-suffering mother, Wells cancelled his indentures and obtained a post as teaching assistant at Midhurst Grammar School near Uppark. His intellectual development, long held back, now progressed astonishingly. He passed a series of examinations in science subjects and, in September 1884, entered the Normal School of Science, South Kensington (later to become part of Imperial College of Science and Technology) on a government scholarship.
Wells was a born teacher, as many of his books would show, and at first he was an enthusiastic student. He had the good fortune to be taught biology and zoology by one of the most influential scientific thinkers of the Victorian age, Darwin’s friend and supporter T. H. Huxley. Wells never forgot Huxley’s teaching, but the other professors were more humdrum, and his interest in their courses rapidly waned. He scraped through second-year physics, but failed his third-year geology exam and left South Kensington in 1887 without taking a degree. He was thrilled by the theoretical framework and imaginative horizons of natural science, but impatient of practical detail and the grinding, routine tasks of laboratory work. He cut his classes and spent his time reading literature and history, satisfying the curiosity he had earlier felt while exploring the long-neglected library at Uppark. He started a college magazine, the Science Schools Journal, and argued for socialism in student debates.
In the summer of 1887 Wells became science master at a small private school in North Wales, but a few weeks later he was knocked down and injured by one of his pupils on the football field. Sickly and undernourished as a result of three years of student poverty, he suffered severe kidney and lung damage. After months of convalescence at Uppark he was able to return to science teaching at Henley House School, Kilburn. In 1890 he passed his University of London B.Sc. (Hons.) with a first class in zoology and obtained a post as a biology tutor for the University Correspondence College. In 1891 he married his cousin Isabel Wells, but they had little in common and soon Wells fell in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (usually known as ‘Jane’). They started living together in 1893, and married two years later when his divorce came through.
During his years as a biology tutor Wells slowly began making his way as a writer and journalist. He wrote for the Educational Times, edited the University Correspondent, and in 1891 published a philosophical essay, ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, in the prestigious Fortnightly Review. His first book was a Textbook of Biology (1893). But no sooner was it published than his health again collapsed, forcing him to give up teaching and rely entirely on his literary earnings. His future seemed highly precarious, yet soon he was in regular demand as a writer of short stories and humorous essays for the burgeoning newspapers and magazines of the period. He became a fiction reviewer and, for a short period in 1895, a theatre critic.
Ever since his student days Wells had worked intermittently on a story about time-travelling and the possible future of the human race. An early version was published in the Science Schools Journal as ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, but now, after numerous redrafts and much encouragement from the poet and editor W. E. Henley, it finally took shape as The Time Machine (1895). Its success was instantaneous, and while it was running as a magazine serial Wells was already being spoken of as a ‘man of genius’. He was celebrated as the inventor of the ‘scientific romance’, a combination of adventure novel and philosophical tale in which the hero becomes involved in a life-and-death struggle resulting from some unforeseen scientific development. There was now a ready market for his fiction, and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; later revised as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and several other volumes followed quickly from his pen.
By the turn of the twentieth century Wells was established as a popular author in England and America, and his books were rapidly being translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian and other European languages. Already his fame had begun to eclipse that of his predecessor in scientific romance, the French author Jules Verne, who had dominated the field since the 1860s. But Wells, an increasingly self-conscious artist, had larger ambitions than to go down in history as a boys’ adventure novelist like Jules Verne. Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) was his first attempt at realistic fiction, comic in spirit and manifestly reflecting his own experiences as a student and teacher. By the end of the Edwardian decade, when he wrote his ‘Condition of England’ novels Tono-Bungay (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911), Wells had become one of the leading novelists of his day, the friend and rival of such literary figures as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Henry James.
But Wells was never a devotee of art for art’s sake; he was a prophetic writer with a social and political message. His first major non-fictional work was Anticipations (1902), a book of futurological essays setting out the possible effects of scientific and technological progress in the twentieth century. Anticipations brought him into contact with the Fabian Society and launched his career as a political journalist and an influential voice of the British left. During his Fabian period Wells wrote A Modern Utopia (1905), but failed in his attempt to challenge the bureaucratic, reformist outlook of the Society’s leaders such as Bernard Shaw (a lifelong friend and rival) and Beatrice Webb. Well’s Edwardian scientific romances such as The Food of the Gods (1904) and The War in the Air (1908), though full of humorous touches, are propagandist in intent. In other ‘future war’ stories of this period he predicted the tank and the atomic bomb.
Success as an author brought about great changes in his personal life. Ill-health had forced him to leave London for the Kent coast in 1898, but in the long run the only legacy of his footballing injury was the diabetes that affected him in old age. He commissioned a house, Spade House, overlooking the English Channel at Sandgate, from the architect C. F. A. Voysey, and here his and Jane’s two sons were born – George Philip or ‘Gip’, who became a zoology professor and collaborated with his father and Julian Huxley on the biology encyclopedia The Science of Life (1930), and Frank, who worked in the film industry. Wells gave generous support to his parents and to his eldest brother, who was a fellow-fugitive from the drapery trade. Increasingly, however, he looked for emotional fulfilment outside the family, and his sexual affairs became notorious. He had a daughter in 1909 with Amber Reeves, a leading young Fabian economist, and in 1914 the novelist and critic Rebecca West gave birth to his son Anthony West, whose troubled childhood would later be reflected in his own novel Heritage (1955) and in his biography of his father.
As Wells’s personal life became the gossip of literary London, his roles as imaginative writer and political journalist or prophet came increasingly into conflict. Ann Veronica (1909) was an example of topical, controversial fiction, dramatizing and commenting on such issues as women’s rights, sexual equality and contemporary morals. It was the first of Wells’s ‘discussion novels’ in which his personal relationships were often very thinly disguised. His later fiction takes a great variety of forms, but it all belongs to the broad category of the novel of ideas. At one extreme is the realistic reporting of Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) – still valuable and unique as a portrayal of the English ‘home front’ in the First World War – while at the other extreme are brief fables such as The Undying Fire (1919) and The Croquet Player (1936), political allegories about world events each cast in the form of a prophetic dialogue.
