1863–1943
“The Monkey’s Paw” was the scariest story that the editor of this anthology read as a child. One of the most critically acclaimed ghost stories, it could not be omitted from a gathering of the greats.
With his first story collection, Many Cargoes, which was published during his mid-twenties, William Wymark Jacobs launched a lively career. In his own time, he was known more for humorous tales than for horrific. He wrote many playful accounts of, as Punch described it, “men who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage”—books with titles such as The Skipper’s Wooing, Short Cruises, and Sailors’ Knots. He came to this setting naturally. His father was the wharf manager at Wapping, in London’s shipping district. Young William grew up on the docks. He also wrote country tales about the ill-fated poacher Bob Pretty. Over the years, staying within his narrow range of expertise, Jacobs turned to writing comic plays on the themes familiar from his stories.
Although he was a thoughtful craftsman, for his light-hearted writing Jacobs was classed among the so-called New Humorists, who brought a broader use of vernacular speech and everyday settings into a tradition of humor that had often focused on the upper classes—although the often farcical Jacobs could never be accused of gritty realism. He found himself grouped with Barry Pain, who also wrote horror stories, and Jerome K. Jerome, author of Three Men in a Boat and editor of the influential magazine the Idler, which he cofounded with Robert Barr, author of the Eugene Valmont detective stories.
Jacobs is remembered now primarily for a number of excellent supernatural stories, such as “His Brother’s Keeper” and the great haunted-house tale “The Toll-House,” and “The Interruption,” with its memorable opening, “The last of the funeral guests had gone . . .” His masterpiece, however, was “The Monkey’s Paw,” which first appeared in the September 1902 issue of Harper’s Monthly and the same year in Jacobs’s collection The Lady of the Barge.
Notoriously shy, Jacobs hated public appearances. J. B. Priestley wrote of a Jacobs reading: “In the poor light of the low platform he uttered very swift words in an inaudible voice, hidden behind his manuscript, which, because it was very difficult to read, caused him to make great pauses of direful silence in the most inopportune places.”
Despite his conservatism, Jacobs married a busy suffragette, Agnes Eleanor Williams, and apparently they did not flourish as a couple.