How do you like your Jack? Part II
Avatars, Heroes and What They Mean to Us...
Part II
[This is the second part of an essay on Jack and the Beanstalk. If you haven’t read the first part, I urge you to go back to my website and find “How Do You Like Your Jack” published on April 15th, 2025.]
Here's where it gets interesting.
In the 1880s and ‘90s, cracks were beginning to appear in the British Empire. Relations with the Boers in South Africa were disintegrating and the UK began the First Boer War in 1880. That resulted in Boer independence. The Second Boer War began in 1889. It was incredibly horrific and destructive to the civilian population in South Africa and resulted in the incorporation of the Boer Republics into the British Empire by 1902.
During this period, in 1890, three different fairy tale collections appeared in Great Britain by three of the most eminent folklorists of the time. These men had different worldviews, different theories of how stories were disseminated and three wildly different versions of Jack and the Beanstalk. While military skirmishes were taking place elsewhere, academic ones were occurring too.
Fairy Tale collectors have been altering stories since they brought back their very first specimen. The Grimm Brothers never stopped tinkering with their text over a period of 45 years. Folklorists both then and now gather their tales and then shape them for their presumed audience, based on their own sensibilities.
In the late 18th century early fairy tale and folk tale chapbooks printed a version of Jack that introduced a new variant of the story. This modified tale held sway throughout the 19th century and was the source for two of the three folklorists in those 1890 publications - one by Andrew Lang, a Scot, and one by Edwin Sydney Hartland, an Englishman. The third folklorist was Joseph Jacobs, an Englishman born in Australia who later returned to England and brought a distinct and exceedingly muscular approach to his Jack.
The gentrified versions of Lang and Hartland included the 18th Century modification: the mysterious messenger that tells Jack that the giant had murdered Jack's father and stolen all his treasures. These eminent folklorists published this more palatable story of Jack just when the horrific deeds of the empire were becoming very public.
The original self-serving actions found in the headstrong Jack are suddenly imbued with a moral imperative. Jack must honor his father and bring home his family's treasures.
Was this just a coincidence?
It's hard to imagine any other folk tale so completely redirected by this seemingly small editorial insertion. Whatever you think of Jack and his behavior, the original version was at least true to itself. Jack’s actions are exactly the same in all the variations, only now they are in service to this high moral purpose. His story is turned into a quest to right a wrong.
Reading Andrew Lang’s version now makes you wonder if he composed it on a lace doily. It is so sickly sweet, so precious and so determined to be morally upright that it makes my teeth ache. Granted, Lang was not the first 19th Century folk tale publisher to align himself with the self-determined guardians of children’s spiritual welfare. But his Jack brought it to a particular pinnacle. Just in time to meet another folklorist who had a vision of the raw and unvarnished Jack.
In its most simplistic interpretation, the Australian Joseph Jacobs wanted Jack to be Jack. He had no interest in whitewashing the lad's behavior and his version tells the ugly truth without flinching.
What's curious about all of this is the recognition that Great Britain was no stranger to wartime heinous acts and reprehensible behavior. It just didn't want anyone else to notice it. It quite happily used its eminent storytellers to clean up its history and placate the people that Britain was indeed one of the good guys.
This is only possible if a country or a culture has some modicum of morality. Gandhi in India and the Jewish refugees from the Holocaust were able to use this fact to lead revolutions within the British Empire. Those two different peoples, oppressed and controlled in horrific ways, were able to publicly expose the Empire’s behavior so undeniably that Britain was ultimately forced to cave to their demands.
Shame was the means that brought Britain to its knees. And moral misgivings were what caused Lang and Hartland to purify Jack’s behavior.
This begs the question about how we see and use our shared stories. The early oral tales we have inherited are filled with hyperbole and exaggeration. Everything is described in superlative terms: the young woman is the most beautiful in all the Kingdom, the prince is the most heroic, mountains are made of glass and boots can cross seven leagues in a single step. Nothing is ordinary or small. And we prefer it that way.
In our modern day, movies are filled with extremely beautiful people shot close-up on screens that are 25 feet high. We, like our ancestors, want our stories to be big. That’s why Jack’s behavior isn’t a problem. He’s meant to be larger than life. His behavior is often admired but rarely imitated by ordinary folk. And when we do see it in others we have a moral aversion to it. Think of the ruthless and self-serving “Pharma Bro” who raised the price of a life saving drug by 5000% because he could.
The quality of ruthlessness, the inability to feel guilt, grief or sorrow is interesting in our stories but not in our lives. Our action heroes behave as if they are above the law because they have to get the storybook job done. But their real task is to provide fantasy and escape for us mere mortals who live in a world of close human contact with others. Most of us cannot and would not emulate their behavior, but we enjoy watching it through the safe distance of imagination.
I grew up with the original version of Jack. I never felt any moral qualms about it, which is saying a lot for a deeply religious Catholic school kid. Even then I knew the difference between stories and real life.
For Andrew Lang, the Scottish folklorist, Jack was “a giddy, thoughtless boy.” In his version, Jack is manipulated by the fairy who has set up an elaborate ruse to get him to undertake this mission. He is being tested and only by climbing the beanstalk does he show his true mettle and deserving of his good fortune.
The other English folklorist, Edwin Sidney Hartland, creates a Jack who is “heedless and extravagant.” Only when Jack is under orders from the fairy/emissary can anything happen. He is threatened that unless he mans up and undertakes this task to retrieve his father’s treasures, misfortune will follow him all the days of his life. What’s a poor boy to do?
For Joseph Jacobs, Jack is a fool and an idiot. But he soon becomes adventuresome and cunning, insinuating himself into the castle by charming the giant’s wife. At the first sight of the golden hen, he steals it and climbs down the beanstalk. But he isn’t content, and re-climbs the beanstalk to see what else he can take. This happens a third time and the giant dies when Jack has his mother chop down the stalk.
Jacobs’s Jack is basically amoral. He is someone who operates outside the realm of right and wrong. He doesn’t have any ethical principles or precepts. He just does what he wants.
The latest interpreter, Australian Army Corporal John Wellfare, called Jack a great villain in a magazine article in 2024 - “…One of the most malevolent and destructive mythical characters in literary history.” Wellfare asks if Jack were a soldier in the Australian army would any of his behaviors violate the military code of conduct? He makes a compelling and persuasive argument that they do.
Here we see the same story but with multiple interpretations. When an editor or an artist shapes a story it belongs to her entirely. She can do what she wants with all the elements. But once the story is read or seen or performed then it belongs to the person who’s receiving it. No one can or should control how we feel about our stories. Our perspective is unique to us and unassailable.
The writers in this essay: the collectors, publishers and analysts (including me) may have strong opinions about Jack, but how you like your Jack is ultimately up to you.
Your Jack is the only one that matters.
Corporal John Wellfare, “Strangers to Our Own Reflections: What We Can Learn From Jack and the Beanstalk,” The Cove, 2024.
The Cove is the Australian Army’s professional military education platform. It facilitates access to resources and events relating to the profession of arm
Photo by Klim Sergeev on Unsplash
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Heckler from the back row here. Thing is, I share your moral principles and I most heartily agree with your revulsion at the atrocities of the British empire. But I really have to disagree with the idea that the South African horrors are specifically relevant to the redactions of the Jack story. I'm standing with your child self here. She was all right with it, and it's her insight I want to defend.
I think (as you have pointed out) that all fairy tale protagonists are opportunists/ And being foolish and thoughtless (young) is where most of them start out. Jack isn't an aberration.
After all, in every version you cite, the story begins with the cow. And nobody questions that the cow belongs to Jack and his mother. In that sense, the cow is indeed all that remains of what has been left them by his late father (his treasure). It's easy to be exasperated that Jack sells it for a handful of beans. But he's not the Biblical Esau, selling his birthright for a bowl of lentils. The whole point of the fairy tale is that these are magic beans.
If he'd sold the cow for money, that money would soon be gone. But instead, full of unspecific youthful dreams, and reckless confidence, he sells it for magic opportunity, which his mother flings away as worthless.
The beanstalk, then , is explicitly not someone else's territory that he invades and exploits. It's his rightful legacy. It sprang from the beans that he sold his family's last possession for, and only exists because of his foolish act of faith. And, appropriately, it sprouts, along with a tutelary fairy, both treasure and a monster adversary. At first Jack just grabs the good stuff. But he can't keep doing that forever. Eventually he has to, as it were, slay the dragon, destroy the magic beanstalk, save himself and his mother, and take on life with what his youthful daring has been able to gather up.
I'm afraid the Jack that I like is the one little Patty saw when she, like him, was young and--as we all once were--full of youthful foolishness.
Fascinating, Patty. I didn't know about the different versions, although various TV series have reflected the different 'Jacks'. I wondered where you would lead us. I like the way you don't direct our judgment and, as you say, leave it up to us to form our own opinion based on the context you've provided. ON this trial of Jack - The jury is out for me. I wonder what other mitigating circumstances may be in evidence! ;-)