August 29, 1854

We learn from the Australian Dictionary of Biography about the scholar Joseph Jacobs (August 29, 1854 to January 30, 1916):

With Lucien Wolf, Jacobs prepared the Catalogue of the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition of 1887 and Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica, on which all future work in Anglo-Jewish history was based. In 1893 his important work, The Jews of Angevin England, appeared and that year he was a founder of the Jewish Historical Society of England (president, 1898-99). His anthropological studies had led him to folklore; he edited several books of fables and in his generation became one of the most popular writers of fairy tales for English-speaking children.

Though a native Australian he left for England as a youth and in "October 1873 he was admitted as a pensioner to St John's College, Cambridge (B.A., 1877, senior moralist)." His scholarly career was important.

In an essay, 'Mordecai', in Macmillan's Magazine in 1877, Jacobs had replied to criticism of the Jewish part of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda; later Eliot became a close friend. That year Jacobs studied in Berlin under the famous Jewish scholars Moritz Steinschneider and Moritz Lazarus. Returning to England he was secretary of the Society of Hebrew Literature in 1878-84. At the St Pancras registry office, London, on 3 April 1880 he married Georgina Horne, daughter of a livery-stable keeper; she bore him two sons and a daughter. In January 1882 he wrote articles for The Times on the persecution of the Jews in Russia...

A few of his folklore titles are:The Fables of Aesop, 1889 
Celtic Fairy Tales, 1892 
English Fairy Tales, 1898

One of the the stories collected in English Fairy Tales is titled "Mouse and Mouser".