The Island of Doctor Moreau

Name: The Island of Doctor Moreau
Author: H. G. Wells

Het eiland van dokter Moreau

Original author

H. G. Wells

Adapted by

Line by Line Publishing,

Read The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells in Dutch and English, a parallel text graded reader with audio. Available in CEFR levels A2, B1, B2, and C2.

About this book

A shipwrecked man named Edward Prendick is pulled half-dead from the sea, then cast adrift again on a whim by a drunken captain, until a launch tows him ashore to a small volcanic islet no one seems willing to name. There a flaxen-haired exile called Montgomery nurses him back to strength while animal cries drift from behind a walled enclosure he is forbidden to enter. The name overheard through the wall belongs to a physiologist driven out of England for cruelty: Moreau. And the creatures moving at the edge of the forest are neither quite beast nor quite man.

H. G. Wells builds the dread patiently, in fragments — a pointed, fur-covered ear glimpsed beneath an attendant's hair, three squat figures chanting and swaying in a jungle glade, a door flung open on blood and carbolic and a terrible red-smeared face. What Moreau is doing to the animals of his island, and why the boundary he has carved between beast and man refuses to hold, unfolds through Prendick's slow, appalled understanding.

Around him the Beast People recite their chanted Law to fence themselves from their own nature: "Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?" It is a book about pain and power and the thin membrane between the human and the animal, and about a man who watches it tear.

The framing is coolly documentary, a nephew publishing papers he cannot verify, and that clinical calm makes the horror underneath it land all the harder. The shore is there for any reader willing to walk onto it.

Available editions

Short, concrete sentences for early learners.

2,782 sentences

Longer sentences and a wider vocabulary.

2,782 sentences

Complex sentences and a fuller vocabulary, close to everyday native reading.

2,782 sentences

Original English — The most complex prose — long, intricate sentences, and advanced vocabulary.

2,782 sentences

Read a sample

Inleiding

Introduction

Op 1 februari 1887 botste de Lady Vain tegen een verlaten schip.

On February 1, 1887, the Lady Vain crashed into an abandoned ship.

Dit gebeurde in de buurt van 1° zuiderbreedte en 107° westerlengte.

This happened near latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W.

De Lady Vain zonk.

The Lady Vain sank.

Op 5 januari 1888, elf maanden en vier dagen later, werd mijn oom levend gevonden.

On January the Fifth, 1888, eleven months and four days later, my uncle was found alive.

Hij heette Edward Prendick en was een heer met eigen geld.

His name was Edward Prendick, a private gentleman.

Iedereen dacht dat hij verdronken was.

Everyone thought he had drowned.

Hij was in Callao aan boord van de Lady Vain gegaan.

He had gone aboard the Lady Vain at Callao.

History

Written by H. G. Wells in English
Adapted by Line by Line Publishing in 2026

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