W. W. Jacobs

Biography

W. W. Jacobs was born in 1863 to a Thames Wharf manager in London. He consequently spent much of his childhood on the water and retained a love for it all his life. When he was sixteen, he began working as a clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank, a job he hated, so he started writing for his own amusement. A few years later, he decided to return to the waterside, and took a trip down the Kent coast, which provided the setting, characters, and even plots for many of his later stories. Jacobs wrote a great number of stories about sailors and dockside workers, but notably, these stories are rarely set at sea. Instead, they are set on the coast or on the wharfs, where Jacobs had spent his childhood and young adulthood wandering.

Though Jacobs is best known for his horror story “The Monkey’s Paw,” the vast majority of his work is actually humorous. In defiance of the modernist conventions of his day, the stories tend to be closed episodes with characters as types instead of complex, more realistic people. He makes little overt social commentary and seems to keep his stories brief and light. However, there are some obvious themes that run through his work; for example, women tend to be more intelligent and manipulative than men in his stories. This is particularly true of the story “Dual Control.” The female characters manipulate and control while the men haven’t got a clue what is really going on. Men tend to be bumbling fools in Jacobs’s stories, and neither gender has a monopoly on good or evil. The source of this line was probably Jacobs’s wife, who was an ardent feminist and suffragette. Another theme in his work came from his hated job at a bank. That job had the dual effect of inspiring him to begin writing and teaching him a disdain for greed, which regularly crops up in his stories. Many characters suffer because of greed and materialism, and others take advantage of that weakness to exploit them. Again, this is true of “Dual Control,” when the women take advantage of Mr. Sharp’s narcissism and greed to make a fool out of him and remove him from their lives completely. The passion for the sea, a love of humor, a hatred of greed, and a respect for feminism all are clear themes in Jacobs’s work and are reflected in his life experience.