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Joseph Jacobs

1854-1916 · Australian-British · Sydney, Australia

For younger readers

Joseph Jacobs loved stories that nobody had ever written down. Long ago, tales like The Three Little Pigs were only ever spoken out loud, passed from grandparents to children and then on again, changing a little every time. Joseph worried they might one day be forgotten. So he travelled about, listened carefully, and wrote them all down in a book. That is why we can still read them today.

Life

Joseph Jacobs was a folklorist, historian and editor who collected and retold the English and Celtic fairy tales that most British and American children now grow up with. Born in Sydney in 1854, he moved to England to study at Cambridge and spent his career gathering stories that had until then survived only by being spoken aloud. His English Fairy Tales of 1890 is where the familiar versions of Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and The Three Little Pigs were fixed in print. He wrote for children deliberately, smoothing the harshest edges off tales that had been told to adults, and he is the reason so many of them end the way they do.

Moments from their life

  1. 1854

    Born in Sydney

    Joseph Jacobs was born in Sydney in August 1854, the youngest of eleven children in a Jewish family. Australia was still a young colony and very far from the libraries he would spend his life in.

  2. 1872

    Sailing for England

    At eighteen he left Australia for England to study, and never lived there again. He went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he read a great deal of everything.

  3. 1882

    Turning to folklore

    After Cambridge he studied in Berlin and then began publishing on Jewish history and on folklore. He joined the Folklore Society and started the systematic comparison of tales across countries that would occupy him for decades.

  4. 1890

    English Fairy Tales

    He published English Fairy Tales, gathering Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs, Henny-Penny, Tom Tit Tot and dozens more. In the preface he complained that English children were being raised on French and German tales while their own were forgotten.

  5. 1892

    Told as a good old nurse would tell them

    For the sequel, More English Fairy Tales, he wrote that he had deliberately used the rhythms of speech rather than literary prose, because these stories were made to be said aloud rather than read.

  6. 1894

    Celtic, Indian and more

    He went on to publish Celtic Fairy Tales, Indian Fairy Tales and More Celtic Fairy Tales, always with scholarly notes tracing where each story had also been found.

  7. 1900

    Moving to America

    He moved to New York to work as an editor on the Jewish Encyclopedia, and later taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He kept writing history until the end.

  8. 1916

    Death, and what lasted

    Jacobs died in New York in January 1916. His academic history is read almost entirely by specialists now. His fairy tale collections have never once been out of print.

Things you might not know

  • Jacobs is the reason the third pig's house is made of brick. In older spoken versions the materials changed from telling to telling.
  • He deliberately made his versions gentler than the ones he collected, because he was writing for children rather than for scholars.
  • He also edited Aesop's fables, and helped popularise the phrase 'English Fairy Tales' as a category of book.

In their words

  • “The fairy tale is the nursery of the imagination.”

Stories

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