W. W. Jacobs

• Born: September 8, 1863
• Birthplace: Wapping, England
• Died: September 1, 1943
• Place of death: London, England

Type of Plot: Thriller

Contribution

W. W. Jacobs, at one time an extremely popular writer of short fiction, is remembered for only one tale, “The Monkey’s Paw.” His other stories and novels are entirely forgotten. Even the book in which “The Monkey’s Paw” appeared, The Lady of the Barge, and Other Tales (1902), has long been out of print.

No one questions Jacobs’s literary talent: His mystery and supernatural tales are brilliantly written. His stories of life on the docks and the waterways of England, despite some dated dialogue, remain witty and clever yarns. Even his dockside characters, Ginger Dick, Henry Walker, and Bob Pretty, are still attractive and enjoyable. Yet literary fashion has passed them by.

Jacobs was a master of the economical style. He never offers more than is necessary about the characters involved. V. S. Pritchett once called him “one of the supreme craftsmen of the short story.” This high praise is deserved; unfortunately, to the interested reader only “The Monkey’s Paw” is available for judgment. Nevertheless, in such a story as “The Interruption,” a tale of a hidden crime, his mastery of plot is clear; no time is wasted. Jacobs added quality to the telling of the mystery story and sharply defined the “well-made tale” from the hastily written pulp story.

Biography

William Wymark Jacobs was born in Wapping, near London, on September 8, 1863. His father, William Gage Jacobs, was employed as a wharf manager on the docks at Wapping. His mother was Sophia Wymark. Young Jacobs spent his youth playing around the docks of Wapping, meeting many of the kinds of characters who would later appear in his dockside stories. The only respite from this somewhat wild existence was his holidays in Sevenoaks and East Anglia. He lived the life of a poor boy.

After attending Kirkbeck College, Jacobs entered the civil service in 1879 as a clerk. He was promoted in 1883 to the savings bank section, where he remained until 1899. While serving as a clerk, he began submitting sketches and occasional pieces to magazines. His opportunity came when The Strand Magazine accepted one of his stories in 1895. One year later, his first book, a collection of humorous sea tales entitled Many Cargoes, appeared, and thereafter he was able to issue nearly a book a year until 1914, when his production slowed. His first novel, A Master of Craft, appeared in 1900. His most famous work, “The Monkey’s Paw,” garnered considerable attention when it first appeared in 1902. A dramatic adaptation, a one-act play produced a few years later by Louis Napoleon Parker, also was received well. Nevertheless, by 1914 Jacobs began to weary of his creations, much as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had reacted against his Sherlock Holmes series. Jacobs’s later books show signs of strain.

A slightly built man, pale in complexion, and retiring, Jacobs was no literary lion. He avoided publicity, keeping to a small circle of friends, including the illustrator of many of his books, E. W. Kemble. Though for a time a most successful writer of stories, he never put on airs. Jacobs died on September 1, 1943.

Analysis

The few stories of W. W. Jacobs that can still be discovered in tattered anthologies are so well written that it is a mystery why his stories, aside from “The Monkey’s Paw,” have been ignored. Those that deal chiefly with crime and the supernatural are written with great control and a polished élan; they belong to the “gilt-edged classics.” Unfortunately, Jacobs became associated with yarns about the dockside, with jolly longshoremen and nagging captains’ wives. He was best known during his heyday as a humorist. Indeed, Pritchett in his essay “W. W. Jacobs” classes him chiefly as a wit. Nevertheless, Pritchett also gives him credit as a storyteller, calling Jacobs’s plots superior to those “of a writer like O. Henry.”

In “The Monkey’s Paw” as well as in the little-known thriller “The Well,” Jacobs raises a genuine chill by underplaying the threat that lies ahead. In his crime stories, such as “The Interruption,” the plot twist always lies just around the corner, and the guilty, as well as the innocent at times, are brought low.

“The Interruption”

Writing for The Strand Magazine was good training for Jacobs. There he honed his skill at alternating sophistication with popular style. His tales show careful plotting, a flair for dialogue, and a sly viewpoint. In “The Interruption,” which appeared in Sea Whispers (1926), Jacobs is at his best. Spencer Goddard is a man who, as the story opens, has just lost his wife. He is not grief stricken but relieved: “At the age of thirty-eight he had turned over a fresh page. Life, free and unencumbered, was before him.” His mood is largely the result of his having inherited a considerable amount of money from his wife.

The first doubt is planted when the maid Hannah becomes overattentive to Goddard’s comfort. She hints that she shares his “secret,” remarking, “there’s few husbands that would have done what you did.”

Then, step-by-step it is revealed that Goddard poisoned his wife. Hannah, who is in on the secret, begins making more and more demands: She wants complete control of the household and asks for a high wage—until Goddard decides that it is time to get rid of her. The reader now awaits the final twist of the plot, as Goddard tries to implicate Hannah, arranging matters to look as if she has been trying to poison him.

Delay was dangerous and foolish. He had thought out every move in that contest of wits which was to remove the shadow of the rope from his own neck and place it about the neck of the woman. There was a little risk, but the stake was a high one.

This sample of Jacobs’s prose displays his technique at its swiftest and most effective. The monosyllables perfectly fit the cool and deliberate thinking of the murderer about to commit another homicide.

Goddard’s plot is foiled, but not by any discovery. Instead, he is frightened by the apparition of his dead wife, which drives him out into the rainy night. As a result of his terrorized wanderings, he catches a fatal chill. This story belongs in any comprehensive anthology of suspense tales, but its last appearance was in the Third Omnibus of Crime, published in 1935.

“The Monkey’s Paw”

Dear to the heart of Jacobs was the story with the surprise ending—perhaps the reason that Pritchett compared his plots to those of O. Henry. In “The Monkey’s Paw,” the ending is cleverly built up over a number of pages, until the tension is almost unbearable. The reader is first introduced to the White family, father, mother, and son, in their cozy parlor. Outside, a cold and stormy night is ever present. The Whites live in a distant suburb, in a boglike environment.

Sergeant-Major Morris comes to visit. He shows them the monkey’s paw, a mummified thing of magical properties. Jacobs carefully and slowly builds on these powers. The paw’s owner, the soldier says, has three wishes.

“And did you really have the three wishes granted?” asked Mrs. White.

“I did,” said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

“And has anybody else wished?” inquired the old lady.

“The first man had three wishes, yes,” was the reply. “I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That’s how I got the paw.”

This excerpt shows the economy of Jacobs’s plot development. In a few lines of conversation the ominous threat of the paw is presented, without any elaborate description.

The skill with which the surprise ending is created in “The Monkey’s Paw” has never been imitated. This story is a unique example of complexity within simplicity.

“The Well”

Jacobs’s other stories took somewhat longer to develop, and one notices in certain of these tales an overextension of effort. In “The Well,” a murder story with a supernatural twist, the presence of the murderer’s beloved in the story, originally meant as a catalyst to the denouement, lingers on beyond any use for plot development. Nevertheless, the horror of the ending is sufficient to overcome this flaw.

Jacobs is a representative of the well-made-story school, which flourished in England during the early 1900’s. Its members also included Saki and M. R. James. These were writers who could grip the reader from the first sentence to the last, whether in a ghost story or a murder narrative. Although Jacobs’s work has fallen by the wayside—unjustly, it must be said—Saki’s still lives on in anthologies, and James’s ghost stories can be found in every supernatural anthology. Jacobs is a writer waiting to be rediscovered; more than a master of the horror story, he is also a fine mystery writer with a keen sense of suspense.

Bibliography

Adcock, Arthur St. John. The Glory That Was Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors. London: S. Low, Marston, 1928. Discussions of various writers associated with the bohemian literary scene of London’s Grub Street, including Jacobs.

Adrian, Jack, ed. Strange Tales from the Strand. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Analyses of Jacobs’s horror-fantasy “The Monkey’s Paw” and a novella of psychological realism, The Brown Man’s Servant.

Chesterton, G. K. “W. W. Jacobs.” In A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers, edited by Dorothy Collins. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1953. Compares Jacobs’s humor to that of Charles Dickens and his farce to that of Aristophanes. Other contemporary humorists are found to be witty but without mirth. Jacobs finds jokes in “funny looking people” and their eccentricities. His stories mimic sailors’ insults and the real speech of the British working class.

Cloy, John D. Pensive Jester: The Literary Career of W. W. Jacobs. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996. Extensive study of Jacobs’s professional ups and downs as a writer. Includes bibliographical references and index.

James, A. R. The W. W. Jacobs Companion. Southwick, West Sussex, England: A. R. James, 1990. Provides an overview of Jacobs’s work and guides to approaching it.

Jascoll, John, ed. The Monkey’s Paw: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Manuscript. Lancaster, Pa.: Hazelwood Press, 1998. Includes a facsimile reproduction of Jacobs’s manuscript, a transcript, analysis, and four other essays on Jacobs and his work. An invaluable resource.

Priestley, J. B. “Mr. W. W. Jacobs.” In Figures in Modern Literature. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1924. Praises Jacobs’s careful plotting, comic dialogue, and memorable characterizations, which are portrayed as models for aspiring short-story writers.

Pritchett, V. S. “W. W. Jacobs.” In Books in General. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953. Argues that Jacobs’s depiction of a “world at its moment of ripeness and decline” makes him a “supreme craftsman of the short story.”