W.W. or The Author

The story under consideration is written by William Wymark Jacobs. The author is a distinguished British writer who is best remembered for his horror story The Monkey's Paw (1902).

Few words about Jacobs' biography: 

William Wymark Jacobs was born 8 September 1863 in Wapping, London, England. His father, William Gage Jacobs was the manager of a South Devon wharf, so Jacobs spent a lot of time with his brothers and sisters among the wharves observing the comings and goings of the tramp steamers and their crews. He was the eldest son and the family was very poor. Moreover his mother died when he was very young . 

The boy came to be called W.W. by his friends, he was shy and quiet with a fair complexion. Jacobs attended a private school in London then went on to Birkbeck College. In 1879 he became a clerk in the civil service, then the savings bank department from 1883 until 1899.  

A regular income was a welcomed change from his childhood of financial hardship, but around 1885 he also started submitting anonymous sketches to be published in Blackfriars. In the early nineties Jacobs had some of his stories published in Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr's illustrated satirical magazines The Idler and Today. The Strand magazine also accepted some of his works. His early stories were tentative and naïve but they were enough to show he had promise upon further development in a career as a writer. Such prominent people as Henry James, G.K.Chesterton, and Christopher Morley commented favorably on his work. 

In 1896 was published Jacobs' first collection of short stories Many Cargoes which has brought him success and even Punch magazine said about it that Jacobs' favourite subjects were "men who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage". It was followed in 1897 by a novelette titled The Skipper's Wooing and in 1898 by another collection of short stories Sea Urchins. By 1899 Jacobs resigned from the civil service to devote his full time to writing. In 1900 he married suffragette Agnes Eleanor with whom he would have two sons and three daughters. 

Jacobs' short story output declined somewhat around the First World War, and his literary efforts between then and his death were predominantly adaptations of his own short stories for the stage. His first work for the stage, The Ghost of Jerry Bundler was performed in London in 1899, revived in 1902 and eventually published in 1908. His last collection of short stories is titled Night Watches (1914). 

William Wymark Jacobs died at Hornsey Lane, Islington, London, on 1 September 1943.

Few words about Jacobs' works: 

As it was mentioned above Jacobs is best remembered for his horror story The Monkey's Paw which was first published in The Lady of the Barge, 1902. It`s a tale of superstition and terror unfolding within a realistic, Dickensian setting of domestic warmth and cosines, is a felicitous example of Jacobs’s ability to combine everyday life and gentle humour with exotic adventure and dread. The Monkey's Paw  has been filmed and adapted for the stage numerous times. Jacobs also wrote several crime stories that have been placed within the British noir tradition. 

Though his best-known story is a horror one the majority of his output was humorous in tone. For example, Jacobs's 1902 novelette At Sunwich Port and Dialstone Lane (1904) are said to be among his best, displaying his exceptional talent to ingeniously devise characters and satirical situations. Often his stories are about the British underclass, sometimes with surprise endings. Critics applaud his dry humour, colourful dialogue, and spare narrative style. 

Most of his stories are set on the London waterfront and focus on characters involved in that milieu. It has been asserted that Jacobs's stories utilized a limited range of plots: the characters are motivated by money, sometimes by marriage or the avoidance of marriage, but nearly all the plots contain trickery or deception. A group of tales are narrated by an old man who frequents the Cauliflower Inn in the village of Claybury; he relates amusing stories about a group of lovable rascals around town. 

Another memorable character recurring throughout Jacobs's work is the Night Watchmen, a retired sailor familiar with the life on the docks, who adopts a London cockney dialect prevalent on the waterfront to narrate many of the stories. Speaking about the story "The Dreamer" (which is under our analysis) it`s an example of the tale narrated by this Night Watchmen, so the further analysis will reveal all the peculiarities of this unusual type of narration.