William Wymark Jacobs

William Wymark Jacobs (8 September 1863 – 1 September 1943) was an English short story writer and novelist who is remembered today almost exclusively for one story — “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), one of the most famous and most anthologised horror stories in the English language. Yet in his lifetime, Jacobs was equally celebrated as a humorous writer of extraordinary skill, whose stories of London dock life and coastal seafaring were compared to those of Dickens and W. S. Gilbert for their comic invention and verbal precision.

Life

Jacobs was born in Wapping, in the heart of London’s docklands. His father managed a wharf on the South Devon Dock at Lower East Smithfield. The world of the docks — bargees, night-watchmen, sailors between voyages, petty swindlers, long-suffering wives — became the material for the great majority of Jacobs’s fiction. He grew up surrounded by the characters he would later immortalise.

He was educated at Birkbeck College and worked as a civil servant in the Post Office Savings Bank from 1883 to 1899, writing stories in his spare time. His first collection, Many Cargoes (1896), was an immediate success, and by the turn of the century he was able to retire from the civil service and write full-time. He married Agnes Eleanor Williams in 1900 — she was a suffragist and Fabian who was arrested for setting fire to a pillar box, an incongruous partner for the gentle, retiring Jacobs.

He published regularly through the Edwardian period and into the 1920s, but his output slowed in later years. He died in 1943, largely forgotten by a literary world that had moved on to modernism.

”The Monkey’s Paw” (1902)

The story appeared in Jacobs’s collection The Lady of the Barge (1902) and is a masterpiece of supernatural horror. Sergeant-Major Morris brings a dried monkey’s paw from India to the White household, explaining that a fakir placed a spell on it granting three wishes — but the wishes come with terrible consequences.

Mr. White wishes for two hundred pounds. The money arrives — as compensation for the death of his son Herbert, mangled in factory machinery. Mrs. White, maddened by grief, demands that her husband use the second wish to bring Herbert back. A knocking begins at the door. Mr. White, realising in horror what is standing outside, uses the third wish. The knocking stops. The street is empty.

The story’s power lies in what it does not show. Jacobs never describes what the second wish produces — the reader’s imagination supplies the horror that the text withholds. This technique of strategic omission influenced generations of horror writers. Stephen King has called “The Monkey’s Paw” one of the finest horror stories ever written, and its “be careful what you wish for” premise has become one of the foundational templates of the genre.

The Humorous Stories

Jacobs wrote hundreds of humorous short stories set in the world of the London docks and the Essex coast. These stories have a recurring cast of types: the night-watchman who narrates tall tales from his post, the scheming sailor trying to avoid his wife’s relatives, the ship’s mate entangled in romantic deceptions, the hen-pecked husband plotting unsuccessful escapes.

The humour is situational and verbal rather than slapstick. Jacobs’s prose style is characterised by deadpan understatement, perfectly timed dialogue, and a mastery of the comic reversal. P. G. Wodehouse admired Jacobs and acknowledged his influence. The stories were enormously popular with Edwardian readers and were widely adapted for the stage.

The major collections include:

• Many Cargoes (1896) — Jacobs’s debut, establishing his dockland territory
• Light Freights (1901) — some of his finest comic stories
• The Lady of the Barge (1902) — the collection containing “The Monkey’s Paw”
• Odd Craft (1903) — more dock stories and tall tales
• Night Watches (1914) — late stories, with a darker undertone
• Short Cruises (1907) and Sailors’ Knots (1909) — variations on the maritime theme

Novels

Jacobs wrote several novels — At Sunwich Port (1902), Dialstone Lane (1904), A Master of Craft (1900) — but they are generally considered inferior to his stories. His gifts were those of the miniaturist: the perfectly constructed anecdote, the single comic situation brought to its logical absurdity. Extended to novel length, the material thins.

Critical Standing

Jacobs presents a familiar pattern in English literary history: a writer of enormous popularity in his own time who drops almost entirely from view. His humorous stories are no longer widely read, partly because the dock world they depict has vanished, partly because humorous short fiction itself has declined as a commercial form, and partly because Jacobs lacks the social range of a Wodehouse or a Saki.

But “The Monkey’s Paw” has achieved the rare status of a story that transcends its author’s reputation entirely. It is anthologised, adapted, parodied, and referenced constantly — most people who know the story could not name its author. The tale’s structural perfection, its restraint, and its primal engagement with grief and desire ensure its permanence.

The humorous stories deserve rediscovery. At their best — “The Brown Man’s Servant,” “In the Library,” “The Money Box” — they are as finely crafted as anything in the English comic tradition.

Collecting Jacobs

First editions of Jacobs’s collections are moderately scarce. The Lady of the Barge (1902, Harper) — containing “The Monkey’s Paw” — is the most sought, bringing $100–$300 in fine condition. Many Cargoes (1896, Lawrence & Bullen) is scarce as a first edition. The Methuen editions of the later collections are more common but still collected for their period bindings and illustrations. Jacobs signed infrequently.