[In the following essay, Cloy traces the beginning of Jacobs's literary career and discusses Many Cargoes as an example of the New Humor school of the 1890s.]

The present neglect into which W. W. Jacobs has fallen contrasts sharply with his enormous popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. At one time only Kipling commanded a higher price for short fiction in The Strand Magazine, one of the most widely read British periodicals of the day, where Arthur Conan Doyle had scored successes with Sherlock Holmes. Jacobs's well known dock-side characters, along with his country ne'er-do-wells, were readily recognized by a large cross-section of the English reading public. The passage in England of W. E. Forster's Education Act of 1870, which spawned a larger reading public by creating a more literate pool of younger Britons, can in part be credited with setting the stage for the reception of Jacobs and his fellow comic authors, a group who came to be known as the New Humorists. Although the coterie included marginal members who sometimes wrote comic sketches, the nucleus consisted of Jacobs, Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, Israel Zangwill, and William Pett Ridge. Middle and lower-class consumers were eager to sample the tales of authors to whom they could relate, told with true-to-life narration and in phenomenally accurate dialect. Perhaps only Dickens can present lower-class surroundings and characters with the same amount of realism; like Jacobs and his fellow humorists, he had grown up in less than affluent circumstances and knew the milieu of which he spoke.

Jacobs's comic sketches caught on quickly and set his course for the rest of his career. Although capable of other types of work, humor was the ticket to money and the conservative Jacobs, like Dickens, was not a stranger to poverty. He turned out a number of short story collections (mostly drawn from previously published magazine work), several novels, and eighteen plays which were usually adaptations of earlier stories over a long and rather uneven period of literary production. In a lifetime that spanned nearly eighty years, Jacobs was to witness a wide cross-section of life—from East London laborer's son to celebrated author. In his later years he experienced the disappointment of a writer whose vogue has passed.

William Wymark Jacobs, the eldest child of William Gage Jacobs, was born in Wapping, in the docks area of London, on September 8, 1863. His father was a wharf manager who oversaw the day to day mooring and refurbishing of barges, and young Jacobs grew up around the river shipping locale with all its attendant bustle and color, actually living for four years in a company house on South Devon Wharf, Wapping, where his parent was employed. L. M. Bates pictures the Wapping of Jacobs's era as a booming sailor town where the shy young boy who had been educated at private schools led a lonely introspective existence, largely out of place in uncongenial surroundings.¹ The family had nautical roots and one of Jacobs's great-grandfathers, also named William Jacobs, had been captain of a sailing vessel in the early nineteenth century.

The Jacobs family came originally from Norfolk and despite the name, has no tradition of Jewish ancestry. William Jacobs's son, John Wilkinson Jacobs, moved to London around 1840 and became a wharf superintendant of the London docks, a profession that the author's father, William Gage Jacobs, chose to follow as well. When William Wymark's mother, nee Sophia Wymark, died in childbirth in 1870, William G. Jacobs married a younger woman who led him a miserable existence; the term most often used to describe her in print being “termagant.” This girl, Ellen Flory, was only eighteen and already pregnant when she and W. G. Jacobs wed. She entered a difficult situation for any new wife—there were already four children in the house (W. W.; Sophie, born 1865; Francis, born 1868; and Percy, born 1869) besides the one she carried. Described by family members as a “tough woman” who was rather small and “queer looking,” Ellen was the daughter of a Suffolk ship's captain. The six additional children that followed (see Appendix B) apparently did nothing to sweeten her temper and she was regarded as a harsh stepmother to William G. Jacobs's older children. Barbara Jacobs Buck recalls her step-grandmother in later life as a silly, disagreeable, affected woman who tried vainly to appear younger than her years. She was not a particular favorite with W. W. Jacobs's children, although they saw her infrequently.

The large family subsisted on very narrow means and W. W. (as he came to be called, after answering to “Will” in early childhood) was later to remember his time playing with his brothers and sisters around the wharves as a pleasant interim in a life of uninterrupted discomfort. This experience was to serve him well as he returned there time and again to draw forth impressions for characters and scenarios in his short fiction. His dismal childhood was brightened by trips to visit relatives in rural East Anglia, delightful sojourns of which he retained positive memories that later were to recur in the popular Claybury stories. East Devon Wharf was near the Tower of London and Jacobs and his siblings were allowed to play in the grounds of the structure, an experience that the author recalled into old age.

The writer learned tragedy firsthand and at a tender age. Besides the death of his mother, an infant brother (Fred) died in 1867, and another brother named Percy was killed in a street accident in 1872, when he was run over by a trolley, which also caused his brother Frank to lose a leg. The look of wistful melancholy that Jacobs bore his entire life was doubtless shaped by this series of misfortunes that occurred when he was still a small boy.² After attendance at a private school in London, Jacobs proceeded to Birkbeck College, then called Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institute. Providing for students who earned a living during the day, the institution was the first of London's mechanic's institutes. The school offered the typical classical education of the period, along with a grounding in modern languages.³ Like the other mechanic's institutes, Birkbeck was intended for the betterment of artisans, but it had gradually given way to the sons of businessmen and those intended for clerkships. By Jacobs's time, there were very few mechanics attending.⁴ William Pett Ridge was a fellow pupil and the two established a long-term friendship. William Addison, a neighbor of both Jacobs and his friend Arthur Morrison, states that the humorist was “nicely brought up” in an area where most of his young contemporaries were unsuitable as playmates. Thus the young boy developed the lonely life of the imagination fortuitously maintained and mined by so many writers. For Jacobs humor became not only a defense mechanism but a refuge for a thoroughly misunderstood personality.⁵

At the age of sixteen, in 1879, Jacobs began his long and miserable confinement as a lower-division employee at the Post Office Savings Bank, a civil service position. He began as a juvenile clerk; after four years he rose to second division clerk, performing enervating routine tasks in the labyrinthine bureaucracy for a less than modest salary. As eldest child of a family that was perpetually strapped financially, Jacobs must have felt pressured to remain in the low-paying job. At any rate, he was not to resign until 1899, when his pen had produced a measure of success that by most standards would have long since established him as a professional author.

Jacobs started writing stories as entertainment several years later, to stave off boredom. In a 1936 interview he stated, “I would get home around four in the afternoon, and instead of filling my remaining hours of the day and evening with an ordinary amusement—say cards or a hobby—I would sit down at my desk and write stories. That in itself was amusement for me, and incidentally an amusement that soon began to yield rather pleasant dividends.”⁶

The increase in leisure time for working-class people had by the 1880s reached a point where most could find an opportunity to satisfy a penchant for reading if they chose, which would not have been possible twenty or thirty years earlier, when the average work day stretched from twelve to sixteen hours, including Saturdays. More affluent circumstances for many people also relieved them of tedious chores like washing, minor home repairs, and heavier gardening jobs, which could be hired out cheaply to poorer laborers, thus providing more time for recreational reading for a number of Englishmen. Richard Altick maintains that probably no other factor in the spread of reading among the common people had so much impact as the coming of railway travel. As more and more citizens used the railroads for both business and pleasure trips, perusal of books and magazines became a ready antidote to the boredom of an hour's or day's forced inactivity. Indeed, from the 1850s forward, a whole class of inexpensive books became known as “railway literature.”⁷ The work of most of the New Humorists has from time to time been subjected to this derogatory appelation.

By 1885 the would-be writer had contributed to The Blackfriars Magazine (Nov. 1885) the story “Mr. Waddilove's Troubles” and the periodical ran another of his contributions, “Miss Griffin's Elopement,” in June 1886. This magazine was produced by the Savings Bank Department of the General Post Office where Jacobs worked; the title was subsequently changed to St. Martin's Le Grand when it became the official journal of the institution. Over the next few years Jacobs also published in a variety of little magazines, including the sketch “A Suit Without Sewing” for Rare Bits in February 1886, a series of forty two pieces called “Mrs. Mellum's Lodgers” in Pick-Me-Up (June 1889 to October 1893), and two stories in Wit and Wisdom, “Nearly a Tragedy” (May 14, 1887) and “Mr. Tibbit's Bank Holiday” (September 10, 1887).⁸ Jacobs confessed to an interviewer from The Strand in 1905 that his earliest work was derivative, largely modelled on Max Adeler's 1874 book of character sketches, Out of the Hurley-Burley. A supportive editor, recognizing his talent, urged him to continue writing and suggested that original material was far more likely to succeed than even the most studiously copied effort.⁹ From that point Jacobs astutely began to develop his own style and the beginnings of the world belonging to the Night-Watchman, Ginger Dick, Peter Russett, and Sam Small. During this period Jacobs lived at home with his family, occasionally selling a story for a guinea or two. He once told Horace Newte that when his returned tales were dumped in the letter-box, his many brothers and sisters laughed derisively.¹⁰

Jacobs was curiously conspicuous among the New Humorists for never having published in Punch. Barry Pain in particular and most of the other members of the group had their earlier work accepted by the established humor journal during the 1880s, a sure route to public exposure. Punch was later to denounce the New Humor as a debasing element in the established standard of comic literature.

In the early 1890s Jacobs met the humorist and editor Jerome K. Jerome, who would publish his work in both the Idler and To-Day. “A Case of Desertion” was the first story accepted by this future mentor, who persuaded the bashful civil servant to produce more material in a similar vein.¹¹ Jerome remained a life-long friend and provided the fledgling writer with the encouragement and guidance he desperately needed. From March 1894 until his first book Many Cargoes came out in 1896, Jacobs's tales appeared regularly in both of the periodicals edited by Jerome. American magazines and newspapers began to reprint material from To-Day, thus giving the writer exposure to a much larger, more democratic and receptive readership. The Wave (San Francisco) carried Jacobs's first American publication, a harbinger of greater things to come.¹²

Jerome was among the first to be labeled a New Humorist, much to his amused surprise, after the publication of his Three Men in a Boat (which initially appeared serially in the magazine Home Chimes in 1889). The original honor belongs to Barry Pain, according to Jerome, who earned the title after publishing a sketch called “The Love Story of a Sardine” in The Granta in the mid 1880s.¹³Three Men in a Boat was damned by critics, although it was well received by the public. Jerome wonders in his autobiography why a new brand of humor received such a reception in England and quotes Israel Zangwill, an early member of the group, as asking precisely the same question. Although badly treated by the press, Jerome maintains gratefully that he was encouraged and respected by fellow writers.¹⁴

Jacobs also cherished his friendship with the well-known illustrator Will Owen, whom he met while they were fellow clerks at the Post Office. The pair enjoyed long walks in the countryside and along the riverfront where they garnered impressions for tales and artistic sketches alike. The Jacobs and Owens families took joint vacations in the Deal/Sandwich area, where several sources claim the author and his artist friend met the Night-Watchman's model (Jacobs's favorite narrator). According to this account, they listened to his stories and Owen portrayed him with his drawing-pad for the first time. The tales of the nautical philosopher's compatriots were to remain preserved for posterity as sagas of Sam Small, Ginger Dick, and Peter Russett.¹⁵

Although painfully shy, Jacobs could be very good company. He had a limited circle of friends, but when he felt comfortable, his dry wit was a keen source of entertainment. Arnold Bennett, once placed next to Jacobs at a dinner party, was amused by the humorist's caustic comments on aging and the recital of a ribald limerick:

There was a young woman of Wantage
Of whom the Town Clerk took advantage
          Said the Borough Surveyor
          Of course you must pay her—
You've altered the line of her frontage!(16)

Anything but a dashing figure, Jacobs is generally described as slight, but he seemed smaller than he was because of his habitual silence and shrinking demeanor. He was fair almost to the point of albinism, with a skin that was nearly translucent. His appearance in photographs is that of a much younger man than his years and he was commonly assumed to lack force and determination. In his 1926 memoir My Life and Times, Jerome K. Jerome tells an anecdote of a public dinner where Mrs. Humphrey Ward asked Jerome who the “boy” was seated on her left. Flabbergasted to learn that the “young man” was the middle-aged Jacobs, she exclaimed, “Good Lord! How does he do it?”¹⁷ In a similar vein, a 1921 sketch of the author in John O'London's Weekly points out that Jacobs's appearance belies his writing. The reader would expect to meet a bluff, hearty, large man with a loud voice and nautical manner, rather than the thin quiet urbane figure presented by the Wapping humorist.¹⁸ Jacobs once told a friend that a lady he knew had informed him he would be more of a social success if he looked a little less like a frightened rabbit, but he almost preferred that observation to another in which he was depicted as possessing the sad face and expression of an elderly maiden aunt.¹⁹

Despite appearances, Jacobs possessed a practical and deliberate nature. His writing style was laboriously slow, often resulting in only a hundred words a day. He polished and reworked his paragraphs, sometimes spending several hours on the composition of a single sentence. The result is prose that is practically flawless—not flowery, but solid, economical writing that employs each word to its utmost capacity. The effort that Jacobs expended on his compositions is evident throughout; even when a plot is weak, as is the case in some of his longer efforts, the writing itself never suffers.

The Springfield Republican [Mass.] reports that when Jacobs was asked about his position as humorist, his response was less than enthusiastic: “People who meet me at tea wait expectantly for my conversation to scintillate, and it never does. If I could be humorous all the time I should write a story a day. As a matter of fact, one's jokes are often born after much tribulation.”²⁰ The author was also a devoted family man (despite the friction between him and his spouse) who loved his children dearly, spending a large amount of his time in their company. Jacobs's literary output declined drastically as his children grew older and demanded more of his attention.

Many Cargoes (Lawrence & Bullen, 1896), Jacobs's first short fiction collection, furnished him with the vehicle for a role as popular author. Initially rejected by several publishers, the book appeared in November 1896, with a small run of the first edition (E. A. Osborne speculates not over a thousand copies).²¹ Priced at 3s, 6d, the compilation was inexpensive enough to allow purchase by less affluent readers. The burnt orange cloth in which the volume was issued soon came to be familiar to Jacobs enthusiasts. Followed by a second printing in 1897, the book after a slow start sold very well for a first-time author. Jacobs was fortunate in placing his manuscript with Arthur Bullen of Lawrence and Bullen, who combined a great love of literature with shrewd business acumen. Realizing the current prejudice against short fiction collections, Bullen decided to market Jacobs's book with men wearing sandwich boards, complete with nautical dress and the short pipes of longshoremen.²² The brisk sales that followed are evidence of his accurate perception of the effectiveness of this unique form of literary advertisement.

The first American edition of Many Cargoes appeared in 1897 (Stokes), although one story, “The Boatswain's Watch,” had been printed in The New York Times in two parts on March 10 and 11 of 1896, before the British edition came out. Publication in such a reputable and much-read institution undoubtedly helped pave the way for the acceptance of Jacobs's first book by an established American firm like Stokes. In four years Many Cargoes went through twenty-three British editions, besides the American imprints and those published in other parts of the Empire. Considering that Jacobs was an unknown and the stories were reprints of earlier magazine material, this success borders on the phenomenal. His early poverty and cautious nature overshadowed any adventurousness that his success might have engendered and it was several years before Jacobs felt secure enough with writing as a vocation to leave his civil service job, although the unexpected success of his first book must have been highly gratifying to the ambitious young clerk.

Penned while he was still viewed as an upstart by the members of the literary community who deigned to notice him at all, the contents of the volume were culled primarily from his contributions to Jerome's periodicals, The Idler and To-Day. The book was critically well received, garnering positive reviews from a number of British journals, as well as the New York Times. Thus Jacobs established himself as a humorist, defining his territory within the East London docks area, drawing upon the cockney bargemen and lower-class tradesmen as his stock of characters. So successful did this formula prove that he saw little need to vary it for over thirty years. The accurate use of vernacular dialogue gained first-hand in his childhood and youth in the Wapping area was to stand him in good stead in these comic sketches.

Earlier rejection by editors, followed by a lukewarm reception of his first admittedly derivative material, accounts in part for an adherence to a successful system that rarely deviated over Jacobs's entire career. When questioned on this point, the writer maintained,

I get the idea of the setting first, and then make a plot of it. If you begin by inventing a plot you have got to sit down and deliberately see something mentally before you can possibly make a start. You can't begin from nowhere. That is why it is so comparatively easy to keep on writing in the same atmosphere, with the same local colour; the writer has his material constantly before him.²³

Although Jacobs arguably employed similar reworked plots for many of his tales, especially in his later days, he demonstrated remarkable ingenuity of presentation—his stories are never tedious.

Many Cargoes as a unit is not only an example of the New Humor school which was gaining a popular following in the 1890s, but a valuable record of local color, showing realistically the working conditions, character types, and daily milieu of the docks area of East London. Reviewed by The Echo on April 15, 1897, the author of the book is thus characterized: “Mr. Jacobs may look at life through the spectacles of the comedian, but he lets the medium of vision colour rather than distort his views of things. He aims at giving a humorous picture of manners, not a series of ludicrous perversions, and so he writes average comedy rather than grotesque farce. In other words, he is no romancer, but a realist.”²⁴

The comedy exhibited in the tales is a populist variety. Nothing intellectually aristocratic or arcane will appear in a Jacobs work. Human nature is presented in its rawest form, with no attempt to subtly mask pettiness, jealousy, conceit, or covetousness. An element of cruelty often manifests itself in these stories. Alfred C. Ward notes “that Jacobs does not show human nature in its nobler or more amiable moods; he does not purvey moral uplift; if one of his characters can do a bad turn to another he will; and very few of his people need to be warned that hell is paved with good intentions—of such intentions they are mostly innocent.”²⁵

“In Borrowed Plumes” contains an instance of comic cruelty. Captain Bross is about to miss his ship because he has lost his money and clothes in a card game and is forced to “lay low” at an inn until his nephew, the ship's boy, can bring him replacements. With little time left, the frantic lad appears with women's attire—the only raiment available on board. No one will swap the skirts for men's clothes and when the boy explains the captain's predicament to the proprietor of the establishment:

“I wonder what he'd look like,” said the man, with a grin. “Damme if I don't come up and see.”

“Get me some clothes,” pleaded Tommy.

“I wouldn't get you clothes, no, not for fifty pun,” said the man severely.

“Wot d'yer mean wanting to spoil people's pleasure in that way? Come on, come and tell the cap'n what you've got for 'im, I want to 'ear what he ses. He's been swearing 'ard since ten o'clock this morning, but he ought to say something special over this.”²⁶

Jacobs demonstrates a dry wit accompanied by understated comic reference; although humorous violence and farcical accidents occur in his writings, they are rarely of the slapstick variety. His characters, as well as his omniscient narrators, employ a tongue-in-cheek brand of insult-oriented comedy that is effective without proving banally mundane. Jacobs's audience was wide and diverse, from semi-literate patrons of public libraries to the urbane and literary, such as G. K. Chesterton and J. B. Priestley. His wit reached a happy medium; it was elevated enough not to bore or prove disagreeable to the lettered, yet well within the mental reach of the average reader. Perhaps Edwin Pugh most aptly characterized Jacobs's drollery: “Consider that his humour is of that broad and catholic kind which must infallibly appeal to the comic sense alike of the savant and the clown. There is none so poor in appreciation of the ludicrous as not to be able to do him the homage of laughter.”²⁷

Many Cargoes helped Jacobs establish a faithful readership as a showcase for the sharp arid humor that became his trademark. In “A Case of Desertion,” when a besotted engineer falls overboard, the unmechanical skipper and mate find themselves helplessly cutting circles in the harbor while attempting to rescue him. We are informed by the narrator:

The feeling on board the other craft as they got out of the way of the Bulldog, and nearly ran down her boat, and then, in avoiding that, nearly ran down something else, cannot be put into plain English, but several captains ventured into the domains of the ornamental with marked success.²⁸

Many Cargoes carved a niche for Jacobs with the British reading public, a niche that was to broaden into a positive edifice. The book has been reprinted numerous times and although the first edition was not illustrated, later imprints bear the work of well-known artists. Several American editions employ the drawings of E. W. Kemble, who was well-known for his artwork in books by Joel Chandler Harris, Mark Twain, and Washington Irving, while the 1912 Methuen publication was embellished with the sketchwork of famous magazine illustrator Maurice Greiffenhagen.

An extremely readable style devoid of the melodrama usually associated with the potboiler or detective story gave Jacobs's stories a singular appeal. Readers came to expect low-keyed, casual relaxation from his tales and with the advent of his happy association with The Strand, could look for an almost monthly infusion. In adhering to the everyday world of the wharves, Jacobs avoided political and social issues; little of real moment occurs in his humorous sketches. Ward observes,

“Experience of W. W. Jacobs's methods speedily assures the reader that nothing of an extraordinarily exciting character is at all likely to happen; yet this in no way diminishes attention, inasmuch as the author has the faculty of sustaining interest throughout his story. In a word, the plot is diffused rather than drawn up to a climax; nearly every paragraph has its inherent story-interest, so that the reader is not fobbed-off with incidental matter which he feels compelled to endure in order not to miss something essential in the plot.”²⁹

That Jacobs is able to hold his audience in this limited arena is striking testimony to his ability as a craftsman. His stories were carefully rewritten many times until he was satisfied with the result. His meticulously polished prose added greatly to the success of the completed product. Jacobs had developed by this time a spare sentence structure which is nearly journalistic in appearance. Eschewing the literary gewgaws of many of his contemporaries, he pared down his work until the result was decidedly masculine—sharply contrasting with the more androgynous writing of decadents like Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Hubert Crackanthorpe. Perhaps this working-class style and its resultant popularity explain Jacobs's lack of acceptance among the established literati. Although he could be seen at literary soirees frequented by recognizable persona like H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, he was never regarded as having attained the same fashionable stature. If this critical neglect bothered Jacobs, he never alluded to it, especially when his stories began to command ample sums, even when compared with well-known authors. Arnold Bennett noted in his journal (dated 1898), “What surprised me most was a statement that W. W. Jacobs (quite a new man, who has published two small books of a quietly humorous nature, but about whom an inordinate amount of fuss has been made) recently refused an offer of 500 pounds for six short stories.”³⁰

In 1898 the German publisher of English language material, Tauchnitz, bought the publication rights to Jacobs's first two books, a solid reiteration of his surprising success. Headed by the keen entrepreneurial business acumen of Baron Tauchnitz, this firm had all but cornered the continental market on English language reprints by the mid-1890s. Tauchnitz generally went after sure things, well-established British and American authors who had sold many copies in England and the United States. His pursuit of Jacobs at such an early stage in his literary career, especially when he was not yet a full-time writer (still employed at the Post Office), must have flabbergasted the writing establishment, in particular those who did not have Tauchnitz contracts themselves. Over half of Jacobs's future books (notably the short story collections) were to appear in these German editions, which made the Baron (and W. W.) a tidy sum of money.

Jacobs's fortuitous introduction to the popular Strand Magazine came in February 1898 when George Newnes published his tale “A Safety Match,” which he had purchased earlier for his short-lived magazine The Million. Jacobs quickly went from relative non-entity to sharer of the limelight with such illustrious names as A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Graham Greene in the pages of this established periodical. Newnes had started Tit-Bits in 1880, where Jacobs had made his acquaintance (one of his pieces had appeared therein), before launching the incredibly successful Strand in 1891. Harold Orel maintains that The Strand emphasized short fiction far more than any of its predecessors and was pivotal in the development of the English short story as a genre.³¹ The real editorial work on The Strand was done by H. Greenhough Smith, the man who signed all the final proofs. A keen aficionado of humor during his forty year stint as editor, he promoted most of the comic authors of the period, including Jacobs.³² The great majority of Jacobs's collected fiction was henceforth to appear initially in Newnes's magazine. Barry Pain also published there, though not as extensively as Jacobs. The slightly later humorist, P. G. Wodehouse, to whom the Wapping comic author has been sometimes compared, had a similar arrangement with Newnes and Smith. Most of the younger man's work from 1905 till the demise of The Strand in 1951 was issued there. Wodehouse and Jacobs met only once, but the encounter was cordial. Hugh Greene says that Jacobs jokingly called him his “hated rival,” while Wodehouse stated later that he was a “young disciple” and had never been a rival.³³

The Wapping humorist's financial position altered markedly after his association with Greenhough Smith, into whose office his friend Will Owen had practically dragged him for their first meeting. While “A Safety Match” garnered Jacobs a tidy 49 pounds 12s in 1898, he was only a year later receiving the munificent sum of 400 pounds per installment for A Master of Craft. This meteoric good fortune was not lost on the poor East London wharfinger's son, who never spent extravagantly and retained his modest demeanor throughout his ascent into literary celebrity.³⁴

Jacobs can be marginally identified with the Cockney School of the 1890s, because his view of London working class life, like that of Henry Nevinson, Edwin Pugh, and William Pett Ridge, is more optimistic than the earlier work of writers such as Arthur Morrison and George Gissing.³⁵ Far from viewing the working man as a brutalized, gin-soaked degenerate, Jacobs sought the humor and positive aspects of lower-class existence. His use of the Thames as a focal point for his stories gave him a unique place in the flood of fiction that poured forth around the turn of the century and he was dubbed by some as the “O. Henry of the Waterfront.”

The vast majority of his fiction takes place on land and it has been remarked that he seems far more comfortable with sailors ashore than at sea. L. M. Bates, who wrote about the Thames and had over thirty years experience with the Port of London, descries Jacobs's lack of first-hand experience in nautical matters and cites his “innumerable technical slips and misstatements” in stories set on barges and coasters.³⁶ Despite this lack of shipboard realism, Jacobs became one of the most-read authors of sea stories in turn-of-the-century Britain.

Jacobs knew East London well; his childhood experiences with sailors, bargees, small shopkeepers, and other lower-class types served him amply in the creation of a universe which, while not as vast or multifarious as Dickens's, was singular and unfailingly delightful. Frank Swinnerton sees Jacobs as outstanding among his peers because of this superlative fictional world:

Though he wrote at first for the same periodicals as his contemporaries, he showed the true Londoner's unillusioned tolerance of sin, his dry amusement with small contretemps, his irony, and his preference for the implicit; and, if his field was small, he gave it universality. More, he converted it into fairyland. He did this deliberately. Knowing every evil that the realists expounded, he toyed coolly, demurely, triflingly with naughty sailors as if their comedy were all he understood. He did this to such perfection that some saw him as no more than amiable. Yet none of the serious, the sociological writers ever, when picturing London, surpassed him. I will not say that he was the greatest of London authors; I say that for all his fun he communicated, as the others could not do, the irrepressible spirit of silent mockery characterising those who are incapable of thinking of themselves as provincial.³⁷

Hippolyte Taine had earlier dubbed the English comic sense as coarse and elephantine, when compared with the subtleties and nuances of the French variety. He admired Dickens, however, only finding fault with his characteristic British heaviness; Taine claimed that the English novelist was too introspective to be happy. The Frenchman maintains that “Usually Dickens remains grave whilst drawing his caricatures. English wit consists in saying very jocular things in a solemn manner. Tone and ideas are then in contrast; every contrast makes a strong impression. Dickens loves to produce them, and his public to hear them.”³⁸ Compared with this fairly accurate assessment of Dickens, Jacobs is much lighter. As a later Victorianearly Edwardian, perhaps he tapped into the freer, less constrained atmosphere that was to emerge in Britain after the death of Victoria. The reader never gets the impression that Jacobs masks or seriously lampoons anything in his jests; they are always refreshingly sincere, without the clinging ballast of socially-intended satirical intent.

The unflattering cognomen New Humorists applied to Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, and Jacobs, became in time a symbol of commercial success. These writers, who all started in periodicals and were distinguished by their treatment of lower-class subject matter, light-hearted handling of slum life, and accurate and liberal use of Cockney dialect, soon outstripped their more serious, “literary,” competitors in the banal business of making money. Once asked for his own conception of humor, Jacobs characteristically declined to commit himself to a definition, instead citing an instance of what he deemed true humor, lacking brutality: “A little girl in her prayers at night asked to be made pure—absolutely pure—pure like Epps's Cocoa!”³⁹

Jacobs may have shown true wisdom in declining to assign a meaning to humor—comedy or humor is difficult to define; the concept seems to defy classication, much like the difficulties encountered when one attempts to explain love or similar abstract emotional states. Wylie Sypher maintains in “Our New Sense of the Comic:” “If we have no satisfactory definition of laughter, neither do we have any satisfactory definition of comedy. Indeed, most of the theories of laughter or comedy fail precisely because they oversimplify a situation and an art more complicated than the tragic situation and art.”⁴⁰ Probably comedy occurs more often than real tragedy. Nearly every day brings something, however miniscule, worthy of at least slight laughter. Therein lies the success of the humorist of the populace—the provision of comic material with which the average reader can identify. Tragedy may prove more memorable, but humor is more pervasive and certainly healthier. Sypher goes on to observe that “often we are, or have been, or could be, Quixotes or Micawbers or Malvolios, Benedicks or Tartuffes. Seldom are we Macbeths or Othellos.”⁴¹ Jacobs could have added to the list of clownish Everymen Ginger Dick, Peter Russett, and Sam Small.

Jacobs would undoubtedly have agreed with Max Eastman's assessment of humor as a balancing factor in the uneven struggle of life. Through his characters the comic writer employs laughter to steady the vicissitudes of an often painful existence. Jacobs knew that life was unfair; his childhood had been far from idyllic and he had experienced the claustrophobic despair of entrapment in a career far below his mental capacity. For him a sense of humor was more than an agreeable aid in coping with existence—it was a necessity. Eastman forcefully makes a case for the power of humor:

Humor is the most philosophic of all emotions. It is a recognition in our instinctive nature of what our minds in their purest contemplation can inform us, that pleasure and pain are, except for the incidental purpose of preserving us, indifferent—that failure is just as interesting as success. Good and bad are but colored lights rayed out upon things around us by our will to live, and since life contains both good and bad forever, that very will that discriminates them practically gives a deeper poetic indorsement to them both. Let us not take the discrimination, then, too seriously. So speaks the sense of humor with a gay wisdom among our emotions.⁴²

Jacobs realized the advantage of taking negative situations comically. It was aways better to laugh than cry, especially in the rough neighborhood of the Wapping docks.

Holbrook Jackson, in The Eighteen Nineties (1922) says that the tales of the New Humorists were as characteristic of the nineties as the problem novel. These short stories, with their untaxing subject matter and spare construction, did reflect the changing face of the British reading public, who desired diversion without intellectual strain. Oddly enough, Jackson includes J. M. Barrie among the ranks of the New Humorists. Barrie, who was a friend of several of the group, produced sentimental comedy and is primarily remembered as a playwright. Although he wrote comically in dialect and his first published works were sketches of his native Scotland, he used an antiquated Scots that would have been almost unintelligible to the more unlettered of his contemporaries. The average consumer of New Humorist fare was unlikely to be a Barrie afficionado. Jackson also makes the rather surprising statement that while it was universal in theme, the New Humor was probably more self-conscious and incapable of laughing at its own foibles than the old variety.⁴³ Nothing could be more innocuous, so devoid of social commentary, or less didactic than the stories of Jacobs, Pain, and Jerome. Gentle, nonjudgmental mockery of the human condition is the overriding theme and raison d'etre of their work. It is difficult to picture a group who took themselves less seriously. All the New Humorists, excepting Zangwill,⁴⁴ who branched out into more serious novelistic and political (he became involved in the Zionist cause) efforts later, confined their sphere to the comic arena, seeking to entertain rather than instruct. Anthony Hope has also been linked to the group, but his subject matter is decidedly upper-class. His The Dolly Dialogues, which first appeared in 1894, deals whimsically with a cross-section of society far above that explored by Jacobs, Pain, Jerome, and Zangwill.

The New Humor can also be viewed as a natural outgrowth of the New Journalism that Matthew Arnold found so objectionable.⁴⁵ This populist form of journalism, epitomized by the Pall Mall Gazette, appealed to working class readers and lacked the “high seriousness” that Arnold held so dear, since it touched on such mundane and sordid topics as politics, religion, and current events. As periodical publishers realized the immense market constituted by less educated readers, an increasing number of journals materialized to take advantage of this untapped consumer bonanza. Discussed at length by Laurel Brake in Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth Century,⁴⁶ the New Journalism helped set the stage for a more democratic, less patrician class of authors. It was a small step from this scenario to that of the emergence of the New Humorists, who represented the comic tastes of the masses through the vehicle descried by Arnold and other literary aristocrats horrified by the democratization of the profession of letters. Despite exclusion from the ranks of the bona-fide literati, these authors all made money and adhered to comic writing for the major part of their careers. Jacobs, like Jerome and Pain, had grown up in the poverty about which he wrote and portrayed it realistically. Although lack of means is an undesireable state in the Jacobs universe, his characters are not debased. Rather, they accept their position philosophically and look for ways to make it bearable, usually mischievous ways. The Echo of April 15, 1897, in reviewing Many Cargoes, surmises, “Mr. Jacobs may look at life through the spectacles of the comedian, but he lets the medium of vision colour rather than distort his views of things. He aims at giving a humourous picture of manners, not a series of ludicrous perversions, and so he writes average comedy rather than grotesque farce. In other words, he is no romancer, but a realist.”⁴⁷ The New Humorists as a whole depicted the plebeian world of London in a totally new light, showing a human picture of unfortunates who were still able to enjoy life, not always axiomatically at their neighbors' expense.

J. B. Priestley, who admired Jacobs's work, was impressed by his knowledge of nautical lore (despite Bates's criticism) and bemoaned his lack of serious critical attention. He disagrees with the assessment of the author as a realist and notes in a perceptive essay in The London Mercury:

These frequent references to the sea are important because they tend to show that Mr. Jacobs, when he has been approached at all by criticism, has been approached from the wrong direction. He has actually been mistaken for a realist. Such writers probably imagine that captains of small coasting vessels, when they come ashore, are immediately plunged into the most astonishing and farcical intrigues involving an imaginary rich uncle in New Zealand and what not; that a pint or two of ale given to any lighterman or bargee will result in funny tales of plot and counterplot that only need a touch here and there to make them into the most delicious short stories. But not only is Mr. Jacobs not a reporter, but an artist; he is also, in his own way, a most finished, conscientious and delicate artist. He is himself such a master of craft that if you take from him nearly everything that goes with his work, that is, his humour, his dexterity in certain kinds of comic dialogue and narrative, his knowledge of the habits and the point of view of certain classes, if you take away all this, he will yet produce an excellent short story of quite a different kind.⁴⁸

Jacobs employs the practical joke extensively as part of his comic repertoire, as in everyday life this often cruel form of amusement produces many laughs. The Wapping humorist was closely true to life in his quotidien portrayal of lower-class existence, except that the fundamental despair of the realist school is absent. There is nothing sardonic in the jesting of Jacobs—his jokes are never Mephistophelian. The butt of one of these pranks is presented as equally human in his ridiculous position as the wag who perpetrated the stunt. The receiver of the negative attention may be sadder and wiser as a result, but he is not debased. Jacobs allows dignity even to the chastened, a state that the school of naturalism does not admit. To the naturalist, men are churned up by fate in an inexorable whirlwind which deals heavy blows to whomever it chooses. The Jacobs universe may be unkind at times, but it is never indifferent. Hope is always present and appears as small favors like free pints, extra tobacco, and shillings found in the gutter. Jacobs's brand of realism does not admit outright cynicism.

Humor, perhaps more than any other genre, is dependent on its current historical and social framework for points of reference. The comedy of one generation often palls on those succeeding; this can especially be seen in regard to political humor and cartoons. While the subtle or open malice that generally motivates laughter is an indispensable axiom of the human condition, its trappings frequently are lost on those who view a comic situation out of its temporal context. British humor was at the time of Jacobs's authorship in a state of flux; the older aristocratic comic writing could not be shared by the rapidly growing middle and lower-class readership. The New Humorists and the magazines they helped support bridged a widening gap between the classes, although they would never be truly accepted by members of the upper crust. H. D. Traill, in “The Future of Humour,” laments the seriousness and lack of lightheartedness among intellectual young men of the period, prescribing healthy doses of the New Humour as antidote.⁴⁹

One explanation for the popularity of these comic writers was their robustness. Rupert Croft-Cooke maintains that in reaction to Wilde's downfall the English mind-set altered from a preoccupation with the sunflower-wielding aesthete's antonyms ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ to the more oaken ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy.’ This distrust with everything evenly remotely effeminate bled over into literature and Croft-Cooke cites both Jacobs and Jerome, along with Wells, as authors who provided the British reader with requisite healthful characters.⁵⁰ Certainly nothing decadent or aristocratic can be found in the works of these writers—their focus is a sturdy masculine perception with all the accoutrements thereof. While many of the humorists' characters may be ineffectual, they are decidedly not unmanly. Nothing could be farther from Dorian Gray's dissipated idleness than the skulking shiftless behavior of the Night-Watchman. The New Humorists may owe an indirect debt to the realistic school of Zola, but they abandon his pessimism at the front gate. Nowhere in a Jacobs work will the reader encounter the bleak and hopeless world of Etienne Lantier in Germinal or the deterministic cage that constitutes the life of Nana. Jacobs is far more closely akin to Daudet, who is marginally naturalistic, yet employs comedy for the purpose of satire in his realistic settings. Daudet's Tartarin de Tarascon is a Falstaffian buffoon who resembles the Night-Watchman or Sam Small and can also be compared with Pain's Tamplin, who bombastically regales the reader with tales of his family. Jacobs's gentle satire reflects his innate conservatism; his lampoons deal with human nature and do not attempt to actually correct existing social problems. While he often chooses social institutions as vehicles for humorous plots, like the myriad religious societies of the period with their pledges of abstinence from drink, one never gets the impression that Jacobs really desires the destruction of these organizations. He might wish that people would behave differently, but social upheaval as advocated by radicals like Zola was unthinkable. When a Jacobs character takes the water-drinker's oath, the ludicrous spectacle of enshrined insincerity presents itself. There is no danger of mistaking this drollery for serious satire.

Like Dickens's onomastic creations, names are an integral comic feature in Jacobs's work, as The Strand portrait in 1905 points out. The Wapping humorist had devoured all Dickens's books before he was in his teens, yet uses a different method of procuring his amusing cognomens. Unlike the earlier novelist, who manufactured most of his names, Jacobs kept a file of all the unusual appellations that he came across, referring to it as needed. He once received a letter from a lady in rural Somersetshire, whose surname he had used for one of his characters, asking where he had heard the name, as she had never seen it outside her village. It turned out that Jacobs had encountered it during his civil service days at the Post Office.⁵¹

The New Humorists have been compared with American comic writers of the period, particularly Mark Twain. Jacobs exhibits some of the Missourian's dry wit and his night-watchman narrator could have easily been created by Twain. He possesses the same homey philosophical wordiness that several of Clemens's characters display, especially Huck Finn and the Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan. This reflective gem on the matrimonial condition from “Easy Money” (Night Watches, 1914) might have been penned by Twain: “Nearly all his money on 'is back, he said, and what little bit 'e's got over he'll spend on 'er. And three months arter they're married he'll wonder wot 'e ever saw in her. If a man marries he wishes he 'adn't, and if he doesn't marry he wishes he 'ad. That's life.”⁵² The watchman, like Twain's Tom Sawyer, was most likely a composite of several men that Jacobs had known in his childhood, dock employees associated with his father, as well as the old salt that he and Owen had met at Deal. Jacobs's humor, however, is more akin to the lighter version of Twain's early period, like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; nowhere does Jacobs ever approach the grim sarcastic dark comedy of the American's later work, such as “The Mysterious Stranger” and “Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.”

The New Humorists emerged at a fortuitous period in British publishing history. Books had become markedly cheaper over the last few decades as printing methods rapidly improved and inexpensive substitutes were found for rags in paper production, bringing prices down. These less costly books were being bought in mass quantities by the rapidly burgeoning reading public and circulating libraries of the period, which reached a large number of consumers. The old expensive multi-volume novels were quickly becoming a thing of the past as publishers realized higher profits from mass sales of cheaper products.

The dramatic rise in periodical production in the nineteenth century also helped pave the way for the popularity of this refreshing group of writers. Since most of their work initially appeared serially, readers who found the consumption of an entire book too weighty a task could freely indulge their tastes in smaller quantities. Periodicals were well suited to working people whose leisure was not extensive and the light stories of Jacobs and his cohorts were excellent magazine material—most could be easily read in a half-hour without mentally taxing their audience. The British short tale, though introduced as a genre earlier, came into its own in the 1880s, after most of the great Victorian novelists had either died or exhausted their desire to write the three-decker novels hungered after by an upper-class reading public. The New Humorists' use of the short story as a vehicle signaled a turn toward a more democratic and less exclusive era in literature. To be sure, aristocratic writing was still to be had in abundance, but the common man's tastes were also being provided for. Critics descried the rise of the popular magazine as injurious to the quality of the established literary journal. In actuality, the surge in literary production occasioned by the opportunities provided by the new periodicals probably forced the older publications to upgrade or at least uphold a standard of literature that was tending to decline. W. Somerset Maugham, who was present during the boom in magazine writing of the late nineteenth century, averred in Points of View (1958):

Many hard things have been said of the annual and the lady's book, and harder things still of the magazine which succeeded them in public forum; but it can scarcely be denied that the rich abundance of short stories during the nineteenth century was directly occasioned by the opportunity which the periodicals afforded.⁵³

Sea stories were popular in Britain at the turn of the century and literary columnists grouped Jacobs with other writers who employed the life of sailors as a backdrop. The Springfield Republican [Mass.] cited in 1902 four conspicuous authors of maritime fiction—Jacobs, Conrad, W. C. Russell, and Frank Bullen, with Jacobs as the single humorist of the group.⁵⁴ He was set apart further by his practice of setting all the action of his books ashore.⁵⁵

One appealing feature of Jacobs's fiction is his presentation of the London neighborhood as a cohesive unit. Everyone in a Jacobs story has his place; he is a recognizable member of an extended family. To be sure there are feuds within the clans, but no one is absolutely excluded. Characters are noted for their eccentricities and accepted by their neighbors in spite of them. The Claybury tales capture the rural isolation of late nineteenth century Britain with its veneration and elevation of local characters to almost heroic stature. Barry Pain to a lesser extent used a similar method to endear his creations to the reader; his Eliza stories encompass a wide range of marginal characters that evokes a humorously interacting network of people who are all intimately acquainted. Lower middle-class readers could appreciate the depiction of their milieu as a positive sphere with its own brand of fun, widely separated from the bleak atmosphere put forward by the imitators of the European realists who wrote about debased slum conditions.

Critics since his death have often accused Jacobs of misogyny.⁵⁶ However, upon careful perusal of his work, the reader notes a tongue-in-cheek rather than a sincere disparagement of women. His unhappy marriage is usually cited as a basis for his dislike of females, mirrored in his fiction. Yet Jacobs loved his daughters unreservedly and must have loved their mother as well, since they stayed together until the 1930s, even after her humiliating arrest for political vandalism in 1912, only separating after their children were older. Most of the humorist's female characters are not believable; they are intended caricatures cast for comic effect. His young girls are too pretty, too vivacious, and altogether too clever for realism. The few battle-axe wives are too awful to contemplate, violent of voice and often of limb. Clearly these creations are not intended to represent reality; they are stock comic characters in the Jacobs repertoire. The most telling stroke against the writer's supposed hatred of women is that they nearly always win in his mock-epic gender struggles. The smug male characters rarely ever come out ahead. As a Victorian male, Jacobs reflects in his writing a remarkably lenient attitude toward female independence, although his personal relations with his wife do not bear out this liberalism.

Another factor in Jacobs's success was his wholesome material, acceptable enough to satisfy even the most prudish later Victorian. Although the climate of moral stringency with regard to reading matter was relaxing slightly by Jacobs's time, the 1890s was still a repressive decade—Wilde's stiff sentence will attest to that. The humorist's astonishing success could be at least partly attributed to his unobjectionable subject matter, which admitted him into the ranks of writers whose works were included in circulating and public library catalogues. The only possible charge a Neo-Puritan might level at Jacobs was lack of seriousness.

Notes

1. Bates, L. M. The Londoner's River. London: Muller, 1949. 92.

2. Biographical information outside of published sources was provided by Ms. Sarah Crowley, Jacobs's granddaughter, and his eldest daughter, Ms. Barbara Buck, former wife of Alec Waugh. Ms. Buck (who kindly consented to a personal interview in London on 3 September 1995) recalled dates and specific data on the Jacobs clan's roots, as well as impressions of the personalities of older members of the writer's family. Ms. Crowley drew some of her facts from her father's (Christopher Jacobs) unpublished memoirs on his parent, W. W. Jacobs. The author remained close to his many brothers and sisters throughout his life, aiding them financially when necessary. His youngest sister Helen (Nell) became an illustrator of children's books; her artwork appears in Constance Martin's 1935 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (Philip & Tacey), Carl Ewald's The Old Willow-Tree and Other Stories (Butterworth, 1907), Hindu Fairy Tales Retold for Children (Harrap, 1919), and Freda Collins's Pow-Wow Stories (Brockhampton, 1915).

3. Burne, Glenn S. “W. W. Jacobs.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 135. Ed. William Thesing. Detroit: Gale, 1994. 300-01.

4. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. 190-91.

5. Addison, William. Thames Estuary. London: Robert Hale, 1954. 162.

6. Sibley, Carroll. “W. W. Jacobs.” Barrie and His Contemporaries: Cameo Portraits of Ten Living Authors. Webster Groves, MO: International Mark Twain Society, 1936. 26.

7. Altick, p. 89.

8. E. A. Osborne's “Epitome of a Bibliography of W. W. Jacobs, Parts I, II, and III.” The Bookman 86 Nos. 512, 513, 514 (May 1934; June 1934; July 1934): 99-101, 138-42, 204-06. gives references to some of the author's earliest periodical publications, most unsigned or initialed. Osborne had the benefit of interviewing Jacobs and was able to track down many exact citations with his aid, although the aging writer was unable to remember where all his early work had appeared. Osborne's bibliography is also descriptive, containing information on the bindings, paper quality, and publication data of each edition of Jacobs's books. Chris Lamerton's book-length bibliography entitled W. W. Jacobs: A Bibliography (Margate, Kent: Greystone Pr, 1988) provides detailed data on first editions of Jacobs's works, as well as physical descriptions and prices of British editions. He also gives a list of uncollected periodical publications, including three from The Strand: “The Stowaway,” 1933, “The Visitor,” 1935, and “Uncle,” 1939. Lamerton's bibliography includes as Appendix 1 an alphabetical list of Jacobs's collected short stories, along with the title of the collection in which they appeared. Other uncollected Jacobs stories Lamerton located include: “Anecdote About a Monkey.” Young Folks Weekly Budget (1878); “Testing a Wife.” Rare Bits (May 28, 1887); “A Strange Compact.” Chambers Journal (Sept. 7, 1889); “Spicer's Ghost.” Household Words (Oct. 19, 1889); “Found Drowned.” The Family Circle (July 8, 1890); “Black King. Five Guinea Prize Charade.” Tit Bits [Christmas No.] (Dec. 1891); “A Sad Dog.” The Butterfly (Jan. 1894); “Musical Notes.” Pick Me Up (Jan. 27, 1894); “Heredity.” Pick Me Up (Feb. 10, 1894); “Dumb-Bell.” The Flag (May 1908); and “Are Film Comedians Funny?” Film Weekly (Sept. 9, 1929). My list (almost certainly incomplete) is included in the primary bibliography of this book.

9. “Portraits of Celebrities at Different Ages—New Series; No. III—“Mr. W. W. Jacobs.” The Strand Magazine. 30 (July 1905): 89.

10. Newte, Horace. “W. W. Jacobs.” National Review. 131 (1943): 379.

11. The Strand, 89.

12. “Rule of Three.” The Wave. [San Francisco] 12 November 1898: 14. This piece was taken from the freshly published More Cargoes. In a brief introductory paragraph to the story, The Wave lays claim to the publication of Jacobs's first story printed in the U.S. (copied from To-Day), but regrettably fails to give its title or date of appearance. E. A. Osborne gives as his first discovery of an American reprinting the appearance of “The Disbursement Sheet” in The Eclectic Magazine in May 1897. It had originally appeared in Chambers Journal on 11 July 1896.

13. Jerome, Jerome K. My Life and Times. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926. 181. Unfortunately, Jerome does not specify the date of the appearance of Pain's story or give the name of the periodical in which the writer was first labelled a New Humorist. Pain steadfastly maintained that the New Humor bore no appreciable differences to earlier varieties. In a parody of contemporary reviewing practices (see “If He Had Lived To-Day. A Specimen of the New Criticism.” To-Day 23 December 1893), he mock-lampooned Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, pointing out similarities between the late writer's style and methods and those of the current comic writers. Artist Scott Rankin's cartoon in the June 1894 Idler depicts Pain with a harlequinesque character and accompanying quote, “The distinction between the old and the new humour is ridiculous and perfectly arbitrary.”

14. Jerome, 110.

15. Accounts of the Night-Watchman's creation vary. Margaret Miller, in Seven Men of Wit (London: Hutchinson, 1960. 146-47), states that Owen discovered an obese fishmonger in Deal named Bob Osborne who served as model for the character. She interviewed Jacobs's son Hugh and Owen's daughter prior to composing her study, both of whom provided oral testimony of earlier conversations with their fathers. Other written versions of the meeting have Jacobs and Owen encounter a garrulous seaman in an inn, who regales them with anecdotes. Probably, as several sources claim, the watchman was a composite of a variety of colorful dock-side personalities that Jacobs recalled from his childhood in Wapping when he spent his after-school hours loitering with his siblings on his father's wharf.

16. Pound, Reginald. Arnold Bennett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953. 183.

17. Jerome, 171-72.

18. “W. W. Jacobs—The Sly Humorist.” John O'London's Weekly. (30 July 1921): 468.

19. Sutro, Alfred. Celebrities and Simple Souls. London: Duckworth, 1933. 184.

20. “How the Author of ‘Many Cargoes’ Works.” Springfield Republican [Mass.] 2 April 1902: 13.

21. Osborne, 206.

22. Waugh, Arthur. A Hundred Years of Publishing: Being the Story of Chapman & Hall, Ltd. London: Chapman & Hall, 1930. 263-64. Waugh's position at this established publishing house gave him the opportunity of meeting and cultivating the friendship of many of Britain's literati. This invaluable connection with the pulse of the contemporary English writing world was to stand his two novelist sons, Evelyn and Alec, in good stead as they launched their literary careers. The Waugh and Jacobs families visited each other constantly until the conjugal failure of Alec and Barbara Jacobs put a strain on the relationship.

23. Hogarth, Basil. The Technique of Novel Writing: A Practical Guide for New Authors. London: Bodley Head, 1934. 124.

24. The Echo. 15 April 1897. 1.

25. Ward, Alfred C. “W. W. Jacobs: Many Cargoes.” Aspects of the Modern Short Story: English and American. Lincoln: MacVeagh, 1925. 230.

26. Jacobs, W. W. Many Cargoes. New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1897. 93.

27. Pugh, Edwin. “The Decay of the Short Story.” The Fortnightly Review 84 (October 1908): 641.

28. Many Cargoes. 223.

29. Ward, 232.

30. Pound, 114.

31. Orel, Harold. The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre. London: Cambridge UP, 1986. 188. Orel credits The Strand with boosting the fortunes of a number of British short fiction writers. Besides Jacobs, he includes P. G. Wodehouse, Barry Pain, W. Somerset Maugham, Max Pemberton, and others.

32. Adrian, Jack. Introduction. Strange Tales from the Strand. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. xxi.

33. Greene, Hugh. Introduction. Selected Short Stories. By W. W. Jacobs. London: Bodley Head, 1975. 5. These statements of Wodehouse's are taken from a letter he sent Christopher Jacobs in 1969 and are included in C. Jacobs's unpublished memoirs about his father. In his manuscript Christopher also quotes another Wodehouse letter written to the Daily Express in 1921: “About once every five years Jacobs writes a bad story, just to show he can do it. All the rest of his work is so much better than anyone else's that even authors admit that he stands alone. In fact, I think you have to be an author to appreciate his extraordinary art, and the amazing effects he can get with a short sentence or even a single word.”

34. Pound, Reginald. A Maypole in the Strand. London: Benn, 1948. 17.

35. Keating, P. J. The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971. 210.

36. Bates, 92.

37. Swinnerton, Frank. The Bookman's London. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952. 27-28.

38. Taine, Hippolyte. History of English Literature. New York: Collier, 1900. Vol. 3. 205. Although many Britons, particularly Leslie Stephen (see “Taine's History of English Literature,” The Fortnightly Review, 1878), disagreed with particulars of Taine's assessment of the national literature, the French critic's overall presentation is generally accurate, if sometimes uncomplimentary.

39. The Strand. 89.

40. Sypher, Wylie. “Our New Sense of the Comic.” In Comedy: An Essay on Comedy. By George Meredith. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956. 206.

41. Ibid.

42. Eastman, Max. The Sense of Humor. New York: Scribner, 1921. 22.

43. Jackson, Holbrook. The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Knopf, 1922. 227.

44. Israel Zangwill started his career as part of the Jerome coterie, grouped around The Idler. His The King of Schnorrers was first published serially in Jerome's periodical (Maurice Wohlgelernter. Israel Zangwill. New York: Columbia, 1964. p. 79). Although Zangwill never completely abandoned comic writing, as he aged his concern with political questions, particularly Zionism, increased. He is better known today as a Jewish/British author of ethnic fiction than a humorist.

45. Arnold, Matthew. “Up to Easter.” Nineteenth Century. 21 (1887): 630.

46. Brake, Laurel. Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York UP, 1994. 82-103. Amy Cruse, in After the Victorians (Allen, 1938) p. 191-205, considers the New Journalism to have begun roughly with the inception of Tit-Bits in 1880. This paper served as the model of many which followed, dishing up heterogeneous scraps of humor and fact which were designed for the fatigued minds of people who had completed a wearying day of toil. This untaxing fare gained an enormous popularity with literate and even semi-literate working class Englishmen. The periodicals offered prizes and contests to boost circulation that proved phenomenally successful. Some of the magazines even earned “respectability” for their proprietors—Alfred Harmsworth of Answers was raised to the peerage. Among the better-known of the publications treated by Cruse, besides Tit-Bits and Answers, are Forget-Me-Not, Home Chat, Daily Mail, Home Notes, and Daily Express. The New Journalism is credited by Jonathan Rose in The Edwardian Temperament: 1895-1919 (Ohio UP, 1986) p. 166-69 with launching a number of authors who had previously encountered difficulties in getting their work accepted by more straight-laced periodicals. J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Andrew Lang, and Robert Blatchford are among the writers Rose discusses. G. B. Shaw had also worked as a journeyman for the editors of these inexpensive magazines.

47. The Echo. 1.

48. Priestley, J. B. “In Praise of Mr. Jacobs.” London Mercury. 9 (November 1923): 28. Priestley remained a supporter of Jacobs throughout the comic writer's career, providing astute, positive criticism on the largely neglected author.

49. Traill, H. D. “The Future of Humour.” The New Review. 10 (January 1894): 36.

50. Croft-Cook, Rupert. Feasting With Panthers: A New Consideration of Some Late Victorian Writers. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. 286-88.

51. The Strand, 89-90.

52. Jacobs, W. W. Night Watches. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914. 201.

53. Maugham, W. Somerset. Points of View. London: Heinemann, 1958. 50.

54. Springfield Republican. [Mass.] 14 September 1902:

55. It would have been unusual indeed if Jacobs's success with fiction about seamen ashore had not attracted imitators. At least one author, Oliver Onions, employs in over half of the tales in his 1908 collection Pedlar's Pack (London: Eveleigh Nash) a night-watchman narrator with personal traits tellingly similar to Jacobs's. Although his stories in general are not avowedly humorous, the night-watchman's dry recounting of events, complete with maritime slang and Cockney dialect, make it difficult for the informed reader to ignore the parallels between the two writers. Also, several of Onions's tales lean toward the supernatural, a bent that the older Wapping author indulged as well.

56. Several critics have interpreted Jacobs's handling of female characters in a decidedly negative light. Hugh Greene, in his introduction to Selected Short Stories (Bodley Head, 1975) is probably the most extreme, seeing the humorist as an utter misogynist. Benny Green, in his “Wapping Lies” in The Spectator (19 July 1975, p. 85), says of Jacobs's ladies, “All the women are sadistic termagants whose intractable viciousness provides decent men with the diversion of the only really important blood sport, which is avoiding getting married.”, while the unsigned introductory essay on the writer in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (Gale, vol. 22, p. 96) attributes the reason for his low view of women in his fiction to his rocky marriage. However, not everyone saw Jacobs as a woman-hater. J. B. Priestley (Figures in Modern Literature, 1924) speaks well enough of Jacobs's younger female creations, terming them “pretty saucy girls with a string of admirers.” V. S. Pritchett in Books in General (1953) notes that Jacobs's characters are types rooted in English comic tradition and therefore subject to the conventions proper to their respective roles; Arthur St. John Adcock (The Glory That Was Grub Street, 1928) points out the amount of variation in the spectrum of the writer's characters, with a preponderance of likeable, mischievous ladies. Glenn S. Burne, who composed the sketch on Jacobs for The Dictionary of Literary Biography (Vol. 135), maintains that even Jacobs's worst female characters belong to stage farce and were never meant to be taken seriously.