• It is the 150th anniversary of H. G. Wells's birth in 2016
• Includes a lively and accessible introduction by a leading scholar of late Victorian popular fiction
• Includes an up-to-date bibliography, chronology, and notes to provide addional contextual interest
• Discusses the contexts and influence of the novel, and its place in a rich tradition of island and castaway fiction, from Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels to Lord of the Flies

​  
'The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals, humanised animals...'
  
A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain, and by his encounters with half-bestial creatures, Edward slowly realises his danger and the extremes of the Doctor's experiments.
  
Saturated in pain and disgust, suffused with grotesque and often unbearable images of torture and bodily mutilation, The Island of Doctor Moreau is unquestionably a shocking novel. It is also a serious, and highly knowledgeable, philosophical engagement with Wells's times, with their climate of scientific openness and advancement, but also their anxieties about the ethical nature of scientific discoveries, and their implications for religion. Darryl Jones's introduction places the book in both its scientific and literary context; with the Origin of Species and Gulliver's Travels, and argues that The Island of Doctor Moreau is, like all of Wells's best fiction, is fundamentally a novel of ideas