3 The conservative tone of such reviews is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that Wells’s second scientific romance was published in the climate of moral suppression which followed the Wilde trials of April and May 1895. Basil Williams, in a review in Athenaeum, found that: ‘The sufferings inflicted in the course of the story have absolutely no adequate artistic reason, for it is impossible to feel the slightest interest in any one of the characters, who are used as nothing but groundwork on which to paint the horrors.’ 2 Similarly, the author of an unsigned notice in the Review of Reviews warned that ‘the frontispiece alone of his new story is enough to keep it out of circulation’. The Island of Doctor Moreau was first written in 1895 through subsequent revisions Wells transformed a relatively conventional adventure narrative into a disconcerting evolutionary fable which offended critical sensibilities following its publication in April 1896.
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