Page 203 - DENG103_English - I

English–I Sanjay Prasad Pandey, Lovely Professional University

Notes
Unit 24: One Act Play: Monkey’s Paw—Discussion

on All Spheres of the Text and Questions

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
24.1 Context
24.2 Overview
24.3 Analysis of Major Characters
24.4 Themes, Motifs and Symbols

24.5 The Monkey’s Paw
24.6 Summary
24.7 Keywords
24.8 Review Questions
24.9 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this unit, you will be able to:
• Know the writer of ‘Monkey’s Paw’
• Describe the biography of W.W. Jacobs

• Discuss the major characters of ‘Monkey’s Paw’.

Introduction

W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs was born in 1863 in London, England, to an impoverished
family. His mother, Sophia, died when Jacobs was a young boy. His father, William Jacobs,
managed a wharf in South Devon. After receiving his degree from Birkbeck College, the
satirical magazines the Idler and Today published some of his stories in the early 1890s.
Jacobs’s first short-story collection, Many Cargoes (1896), won popular acclaim, prompting
him to quit working as a clerk and begin writing full-time. Jacobs wed Agnes Eleanor, a
prominent suffragette, in 1900, and they had five children together.
He success of Jacobs’s fiction enabled him to escape his scrappy, hard-luck childhood and dull
life as a civil servant. His early experiences benefited him greatly, however. He had spent a
lot of time hanging around the wharves in London, and many of his short stories and novels
concern seamen’s lives and adventures. Jacobs’s works include The Skipper’s Wooing (1897),
Sea Urchins (1898), Light Freights (1901), Captains’ All (1902), Sailors’ Knots (1909), and Night
Watches (1914). All told, Jacobs published thirteen collections of short stories, five novels, and
a novella, many of which sold tens of thousands of copies. He also wrote a number of one-
act plays. His financial security was further solidified by the popular Strand magazine, which
began publishing Jacobs’s short stories in 1898 and continued to do so throughout much of his
life. Jacobs died in 1943.

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