READERS OF THE TWO stories that follow will not find it easy to believe that W(illiam) W(ymark) Jacobs (1863–1943) gained his fame and fortune as a writer of humorous tales, sketches, and plays, as it will be difficult to find hints of hilarity in his ghost stories. Born in Wapping, London, he lived close to the sea and his father was the manager of a wharf in South Devon, which helps to explain why so many of his stories were about sailors and others connected to the shipping world. A famously quiet, self-effacing man, he took a job as a civil servant and, in his spare time, began in 1885 to write humorous sketches for Blackfriar’s, Punch, and The Strand. They were popular enough to be collected in Many Cargoes in 1896, quickly followed by the novel The Skipper’s Wooing (1897) and another collection, Sea Urchins (1898). With financial burdens eased, he married the suffragette Agnes Eleanor Williams in 1900. Although quite prolific for two decades, his last book, Night Watches, appeared in 1914; subsequent titles were largely of previously published stories.
“The Monkey’s Paw” is one of the most frequently anthologized stories of all time, as well as one of the most bone-chilling. It has been adapted relentlessly: for radio, as a 1907 play, in motion pictures (several silent films as well as a 1933 talkie and a 1948 remake), for television as episodes of Suspense (May 17, 1949, and again on October 3, 1950), Great Ghost Tales (July 20, 1961), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (April 19, 1965), and Great Mysteries (November 10, 1973), and for three operas. Somewhat less familiar is “The Toll-House,” which ranks a close second in its ability to turn the blood chilly.
“The Monkey’s Paw” was first published in the September 1902 issue of Harper’s Monthly; it was collected in The Lady of the Barge (London, Harper & Brothers, 1902). “The Toll-House” was first published in the April 1907 issue of The Strand; it was collected in Sailors’ Knots (London, Methuen, 1909).