Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 2.pdf/21

 PREFACE TO VOLUME II

"The Island of Doctor Moreau" was written in 1895, and it was begun while "The Wonderful Visit" was still in hand. It is a theological grotesque, and the influence of Swift is very apparent in it. 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. This story embodies this ideal, but apart from this embodiment it has no allegorical quality. It is written just to give the utmost possible vividness to that conception of men as hewn and confused and tormented beasts. When the reader comes to read the writings upon history in this collection, he will find the same idea of man as a re-shaped animal no longer in flaming caricature, but as a weighed and settled conviction.

"When the Sleeper Wakes," whose title I have altered to "The Sleeper Awakes," was first published as a book in 1899 after a serial appearance in the Graphic and one or two American and colonial periodicals. It was one of the most ambitious and least satisfactory of my earlier books, and in 1911 I took the opportunity afforded by its reprinting to make a ix