WW Jacobs and Monkey’s Paw
It’s now renowned as one of the scariest horror stories in Victorian English literature. Along with ‘The Turn of the Screw’, WW Jacob’s classic ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ was a subtle chiller long before horror meant mayhem and gore. In this horror tale, it’s all about suggestion and fear, with little actually seen.
But while the Wapping is best known for ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ these days it was a piece out of character for the phenomenally successful East End writer. In his day, Jacobs was one of the best paid authors writing in English. But his stock in trade was warm and humorous tales from the East End docks, characterised by a great ear for the language and slang of his home. Punch magazine described his stories as about ‘men who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage’.
William Wymark Jacobs was born in Wapping on 8 September 1863. hIS father, Willaim Gage Jacobs was the manager of the South Devon Wharf, and young William and his siblings would spend much time at the wharf, watching the arrival and departure of the tramp steamers, and soaking up the language of their crews.
His mother, Sophia, would die while William was still a boy, and his father would remarry. And though the Jacobs, a large family, had little money, there was enough to send William off to public school in London. Holidays meanwhile were spent at relatives in the East Anglian countryside or holidaying at a cottage near Sevenoaks in Kent.
His education continued in London, as William went on to Birkbeck College before settling to a life of dull financial solidity as a clerk in the civil service and then (from 1883 to 1899) working in Post Office Savings Bank. As early as 1885 though he was having short stories published. There were numerous weekly literary magazines (Dickens and Wilkie Collins were just two other Victorian writers who would make a living taking the same route). He was published in Jerome K Jerome and Robert Barr’s magazines Today and The Idler; Strand magazine took his stories too.
Perhaps the money problems of his childhood made William hang on to security longer than he needed, for he didn’t leave the Post Office until 1899. By then he was already a highly paid writer. Fellow author Arnold Bennett was amazed (writing in 1898) that Jacobs was able to turn down £500 for six short stories, a huge sum for the time. As well as financial rewards, he was gaining plaudits from established writers such as GK Chesterton and Henry James.
In 1899 he was a freelance with a number of collections of short stories (including ‘Many Cargoes’ and ‘Sea Urchins’) under his belt, as well as a novel in ‘The Skipper’s Wooing’. A year later he wed suffragette Agnes Eleanor, and the pair moved out to Buckhurst Hill in Essex. The pair had five children and an extended household of family members and several servants.
Novelettes and short stories followed, and it was a collection of the latter, The Lady of the Barge, in 1902 which contained his classic ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ as well as ‘The Toll House’, which has also stood the test of time.
The tale, in which a cursed monkey’s paw brings a couple three wishes, but at a terrible cost, was a huge success. It was turned into a play in 1907, numerous radio plays and several film versions - eight at the last count, and ranging from 1915 to 2003. Even if people know the ending, as surely they must by now, Jacobs’ story obviously had enduring appeal.
For the whole of his long life (Jacobs lived to see the Blitz) his stories retained their popularity and were in continuous publication. The East End boy was now financially secure, and the impetus to produce new work slackened. Indeed from the First World War onward, he worked mainly on adaptations of earlier works for the London stage. Between ‘Night Watches’ in 1914 and his last work, ‘Sea Whispers’ in 1926, there were only four new essays into print. And for the last 17 years of his life, Jacobs subsided into comfortable retirement. He died at Islington in 1943.
* Because of their age, Jacobs’ works are now out of copyright, and can be read, enjoyed and downloaded for free at Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org.
July 10th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Thank you for the article about W.W.Jacobs in the issue of “East End Life” of 28th April to 4th May. It was very interesting. Unfortunately your very last paragraph regarding Project Gutenberg is misleading. The fact is that none of Jacobs books are yet out of copyright in the European Union. A book does not come out of copyright till its author has been dead for over 70 years, and so Jacobs’ copyright extends to 31st December 2013.
But, as you say, most of his books can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg, but not all, as will be seen. Copyright law in the US works quite differently than it does in the European Union, for it is an edition, rather than the book itself, that comes out of copyright. There is a single cut-off date. Editions issued before 1923 are out of copyright. Editions issued after 1922 are not out of copyright. That is a fixed date, and does not roll forward year by year. It is a date fixed by legislation influenced by the Disney Corporation, so that Mickey Mouse will never come out of copyright. I hope that this sort of legislation could never be enacted here in the European Union.
The last book written by Jacobs was “Sea Whispers”, published in 1926. This is not out of copyright in the US, and never will be. We shall have to wait until 2014 before we can see it in Project Gutenberg Europe. But there is yet a third form of copyright law, to be found in Australia (and many other countries), where copyright expires fifty years after the author’s death. Unfortunately, “Sea Whispers” is not yet to be found in “Project Gutenberg Australia”, but perhaps that will be remedied soon.
As regards British books on Project Gutenberg in the US, I have myself posted over 450 British novels from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries onto PG. To do this, first you have to ensure that the edition you are going to use was published before 1923. Look the book up to match Title, Author, Publisher, number of pages, and if possible illustrator and number of illustrations, on a website called Copac. This website is very easy to use, and is a composite of the British copyright libraries and the principal British academic libraries. It is very rare not to find the information you need from this website. Having provided the evidence that the edition you have is out of US copyright you present this to PG’s copyright scrutineers. They will usually come back to you with permission to proceed, within a few days. You can then scan and OCR the book, and check it over very carefully for typos (in the original typesetting) and for misreads (usually due to a bad patch on the printed page). When you have corrected all these, and done all you can to ensure the correctness of your transcription, you send it to one of the teams PG has for finally checking and posting the books. When they have done that they send it on to someone called the Indexer, and it is then put into the PG index so that it can be downloaded by the public.
In actual fact there will still be a very small number of errors that have eluded all these people. The Library of Congress has set a target level so that the words and punctuation in the book should be better than 99.95% correct, but most transcribers achieve a far higher standard than that.
Having said all that, it is true that most of Jacobs’ books can be downloaded easily from Project Gutenberg. To read them I strongly recommend a program called yBook, which is free, and available from a website called Spacejock. There is also available some excellent technology for easily creating audiobooks, the best program and voice being available at a small charge from NextUp.com.
Kind regards,
Nick Hodson