Since Mengele, figures like Moreau — the book horrified the Victorians — seem almost quaint; you don’t get the same mad scientist characters now, really.

The monologue at the end seems to prophesy the catastrophe to come (and also segues nicely into The War of the Worlds). So too does Moreau’s attitude towards his subjects.

Ruminations on the animal within/beneath civilization parallel those in J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise. As well as the closing monologue, the moment where the human characters hunt the leopard-man with the other creatures (where man and beast are indistinguishable), and brief allusions to the abandonment of monogamy (the description of which Wells refuses to give).

A typical reading of this would examine the public’s fears about science, progress, and the crisis of morality after the death of God (Moreau’s attitude to pain) — but I think the constitution of society itself would have to figure, within which science as a specialized sphere, separate to the goal of human happiness, actually takes place, its operations rendering its subjects objects. In other words, the separation of ‘science’ and ‘the public’ itself has to be dealt with.