Joseph Jacobs
Folklorist

Joseph Jacobs was a noted Jewish historian and folklorist. His scholarly pursuits, over the years, led him to a fascination with fairy tales, and he created several of the most outstanding fairy tale collections of the Gilded Age.

His style and story selection proved to be a perfect platform for artist John D. Batten's dreamy golden pictures, and the two created several volumes of fairy tales that are considered classics today.

Joseph Jacobs was born in Australia, the son of Jewish immigrants from Britain, in 1854. By all accounts, he was an accomplished scholar in grade school as well as a popular young man, and was ultimately admitted to St. John's College in Cambridge on scholarship, where he achieved a bachelor's degree in 1877.

His following studies were in Germany, and when he returned he became secretary of the Society of Hebrew Literature and a writer and Jewish activist.

His real love was anthropology, especially in the area of myth and mythology. Chances are, he was in at least lateral contact with Freud and Jung, both Germans involved in groundbreaking scholarship involving myth and human meaning.

Later, the famed mythologist Joseph Campbell used the same scholarship pool to develop his brilliant theses about myth and story and human development. But Jacob's pre-Campbellian work was every bit as brilliant as that later light.

During the 1890s, Jacobs edited the magazine Folk-Lore, and collected tome after tome of fairy stories: Celtic Fairy Tales, English Fairy Tales, The Fables of Aesop, Irish Fairy Tales, Indian Fairy Tales, and many others that are still in print today.

One of his greatest contributions to the world of folklore was his recognition that Cinderella was a universal story, and that a version can be found in almost every culture throughout the world. Though he was not the first to observe this, he was in a position to make this fact well-known.

Without Jacobs, it is likely Disney would not have so much material to turn into movies!

His longest-standing and most productive professional relationship was with John D. Batten, an obscure (unfortunately) artist who illustrated all of Jacobs' fairy tale collections.

Batten used a style different from other book illustrators of the time, with a golden oil-painting haze giving each full-color plate a surreality that brings fans even today further into the magical world woven by Jacobs.

The two worked brilliantly together, Jacobs' readable style bringing the story to life and Batten's gorgeous illustrations giving them breath.

All good things must end, and the Jacobs-Batten partnership was brought to an abrupt halt when Jacobs died in Yonkers, New York, of heart disease in 1916.

His fairy collections still live on, however, a legacy to be enjoyed in differing formats by generations.