He turned seventeen of his stories into plays (often in collaboration); one story, "The Skipper of the
Osprey " (
Many Cargoes, 1896), was made into a 1933 movie; and another,"The Boatswain's Mate" (
Captains All, 1905), provided the libretto for a 1916 opera by Ethyl Smyth. Most of his stories were collected periodically and published in book form, twelve volumes in all, beginning with
Many Cargoes.
William Wymark Jacobs was born in London on 8 September 1863, the son of a Thames wharf manager. He grew up in the dockland area of Wapping, London, and was educated in private schools. At the age of sixteen he entered the civil service as a clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank, a job he hated, referring to it as his "days of captivity." Around the age of twenty he began writing humorous stories for his own amusement, and by 1885 he was publishing in little magazines. He recalled that "it was not until I had been writing for some years for amusement and a little extra pocket money that I began to write of the waterside.... Then the coastwise trips that I had taken in my youth came back to me with all the illusion of the past."
Those "coastwise trips" and frequent wanderings along the Kent coast with the illustrator of his books, his friend Will Owen, provided the settings and characters, if not the plots, of his waterfront stories.
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