Joseph Jacobs

Jacobs was born in Sydney in 1854, came to England to study at Cambridge, and made his name first as a historian of Jewish life in medieval England. Folklore was the second of three careers. The third began in 1900, when he moved to New York to edit the Jewish Encyclopedia, and he died there in 1916.

The problem he set himself was a national embarrassment. By the 1880s English children knew Grimm and Perrault and Andersen, and their own country's tales were unprinted, scattered through antiquarian journals and county dialect studies where no child would ever meet them. English Fairy Tales appeared in 1890, More English Fairy Tales in 1894, and Celtic, Indian and Europa's Fairy Book followed. He was frank about what he had done: where a tale survived only in fragments or in heavy dialect he rewrote it, and he said so in his notes.

His rule was that a tale should be tellable aloud by a parent who had not rehearsed it. That is why his sentences are short and his repetitions exact, and it is why his texts work for a language learner more than a century later. The folk tales shelf on this site uses his 1890 wording rather than a retelling, which is unusual for a beginner shelf and worth it: this is what the stories actually sound like.

He is also the reason a few of these tales exist in print at all. Molly Whuppie, Nix Nought Nothing and Kate Crackernuts reached him through Andrew Lang and a handful of correspondents, and without the two collections they might have gone the way of the hundreds that did not get written down.