Jacobson demonstrated precocious literary talent as a boy – he likes to tell the story of how a primary schoolteacher wrote a letter to his mother, which she framed, declaring that Jacobson was destined ‘to become an important writer’ ( Wintle 2013: 9), and he told James O’Brien that he ‘wrote a little play when I was nine’ ( O’Brien 2019) – but in spite of these auspicious beginnings, he felt constrained by his background: ‘being a working-class Manchester boy the omens didn’t feel right’ ( O’Brien 2019). That one might be a serious novelist while also ‘being funny’ was the great epiphany that launched Jacobson’s career as a novelist.
