Wells (H.G.) The Island of Doctor Moreau

London, William Heinemann, 1896.

First UK edition, first impression, first issue with rear advertisement for The Time Machine on terminal leaf preceding publisher’s list. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth, without publisher’s monogram to lower board.

The cruellest of the great scientific romances, and the one Wells himself called an exercise in youthful blasphemy: Prendick, shipwrecked, is landed on an island where the exiled vivisectionist Moreau carves animals into men, the Beast Folk, chanting their Law in the dusk (“Are we not Men?”) against the pull of tooth and claw, while their maker works uphill of them in the House of Pain. Published into the white heat of the vivisection controversy, it was received with genuine revulsion (reviewers reached for “perverse” and worse) because Wells had aimed past the surgery at the theology: a creator indifferent to his creations’ suffering, a Law that is only fear, and the closing horror that London’s faces look no different…