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Ink and watercolor portrait of a balding man with a full graying beard and round wire spectacles, in a dark three-piece suit and tie.

Joseph Jacobs

1854–1916

Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916) was born in Sydney, made his career in London and died in New York State. He gathered English fairy tales for a reason he stated plainly: English children knew the German and the Celtic stories far better than their own.

The tales were one strand of his work. He wrote on Jewish history, edited the journal Folklore in 1899 and 1900, and from 1900 was revising editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia, a project with six hundred contributors.

The collections came quickly: English Fairy Tales in 1890, Celtic Fairy Tales and Indian Fairy Tales in 1892, then a second volume each of the English and the Celtic, all illustrated by John Dickson Batten. Jacobs retold them to be read aloud to children while keeping the scholar’s habits: he sorted his own English collection into proper wonder tales, legends, drolls, cumulative stories, beast tales and nonsense.

Tales by Joseph Jacobs

2 tales