The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Please post any background information about the author, or other additional materials which you think will be useful and relevant to our discussion of the book. Post spoiler warnings when appropriate.

For background on H.G. Wells, see Post 2 of The Time Machine thread.

I read this book last year in conjunction with a Coursera course on fantasy & scifi, and it was my favorite of all the material we read. The professor had some fascinating lectures, so I will go back and review the one on Moreau and add anything I find of interest here.

This biography of Wells gives some insight into his personal and political life. Wells was a Fabian socialist and a strong supporter of Women's rights.

http://www.biography.com/people/hg-we...

http://www.onthisveryspot.com/find/sp...

Like many people of his time he was also an Eugenicist and believed in sterilisation to control the mentally ill and feeble. In his book Tono Bungay he proposed that those wishing to marry should first be vetted by the state to ascertain their mental and physical fitness. Following the rise of Nazism such views now seem very extreme to us but they were commonplace in the late 19th century. Sterilisation was practised in several US States and as late as the 1970s 'Nixon dramatically increased Medicaid-funded sterilization of low-income Americans, primarily Americans of color':-

http://civilliberty.about.com/od/gend...

These views coloured much of Well's writing about other worlds and 'aliens', where the subject matter often deals with the superiority of one race over another. The Island of Dr Moreau is of this ilk and presages the dreadful experiments carried out by Nazi doctors on 'lesser' human beings in order to create a superior Aryan race.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_hum...

The U.S. did uninformed/unconsented testing on subjects with regard to radiation. Working from memory here, I believe there were tests done at a school where the children were fed cereal that had been irradiated.