The Island of Doctor Moreau

THE RARE COLONIAL ISSUE
first edition, colonial issue 8vo. [2 (blank)], x, 219, [1 (blank), [1 (author's note)], [1 (printer's slug)], [1 (advts. for 'The Time Machine')], [1 (blank)], [8 (Heinemann's advts.)]pp., publisher's red cloth, black lettered on front cover and spine, small publisher's device in black on rear cover, Heinemann's advertisements on endpapers (both paste-down and free), spine a bit faded, a very good copy. The rare colonial issue.

This 'Colonial Library' issue, published in the same year as the first, is rare. OCLC locates it only in Pierpont Morgan Library and National Library of New Zealand.
In this issue the half-title reads across head "Heinemann's Colonial Library of Popular Fiction/ Volue LII" and at foot "Issued for sale in the British Colonies and India, and not to be imported into Europe or the United States of America". For this issue the yellow pictorial cloth of the first issue has been substituted by a plainer red cloth. The front end papers list the contents of Heinemann's Colonial Library of Popular Fiction which were published mostly both in cloth and in paper covers. These end papers, apparently printed in early 1896, list 'The Island of Dr. Moreau' as a title to be added to the series in both bindings.H. G. Well's (1866–1946) early and classic science fiction work The Island of Doctor Moreau of 1896 relates how a shipwrecked man ended up on the "island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The novel deals with a number of philosophical themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human interference with nature. ... The novel is the earliest depiction of the science fiction motif "uplift" in which a more advanced race intervenes in the evolution of an animal species to bring the latter to a higher level of intelligence. ... At the time of the novel's publication in 1896, there was growing discussion in Europe of the possibility of the degeneration of the human race. Increasing opposition to animal vivisection led to formation of groups like the National Anti-Vivisection Society in 1875, and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898. The Island of Dr. Moreau reflects the ethical, philosophical, and scientific concerns and controversies raised by these themes and the ideas of Darwinian evolution which were so disrupting to social norms in the late 1800s" [wikipedia]. It has been adapted to film on more than one occasion and has had a wide influence on popular culture in genres as various as literature, music and even video games.
"The most Swiftian - the most sustained - of all Wells's science fiction satires" [Survey of Science Fiction Literature, III, p.1079-83]