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1 results

  • Chapter 6 - H. G. Wells on the Possibilities of Painlessness

  • from Part III - Representing Pain
  • Asha Hornsby, University of St Andrews
  • Book:
    Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture
    Published online:
    30 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025, pp 157-182

  • Summary

    Chapter 6 returns to H. G. Wells to offer a fuller account of this writer’s longstanding fascination with animal experimentation, a practice he supported. Analysis of The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), short stories, and essays reveal this author’s investment in contemporary scientific debates surrounding the thorny issues surrounding non-human pain introduced in Chapter 5. Despite differences in genre and tone, the selected texts each exploit the uneasy relationship between injury, experience, and expression to raise compelling questions about pain’s purpose and limits. The period’s vivisection debates were an important and productive context for Wells who capitalised on the ambivalence they produced, undermined the generic expectations of writings about the subject, and considered whether literary and linguistic methods could uniquely capture – or even solve – the problem of pain.