Mr. Miacca is an English folktale of the ‘bogeyman’ type, where adults tell stories of imaginary beings to frighten young children into being good. In the story, a boy does something wrong and finds himself about to be cooked for Mr. Miacca’s dinner. He gets away by tricking Mrs. Miacca. The forgetful boy makes the same mistake, and again finds himself on Mr. Miacca’s dinner menu. This time Mr. Miacca watches over the boy himself, and decides to cut off the lad’s leg (which he throws in the cooking pot) to make sure he doesn’t run away.
Our source for Mr Miacca was a children’s book called English Fairy Tales by folktale collector Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1890. Jacobs collected many of his stories by interviewing people about folktales they had heard as a child. He wrote that this one came from a woman who’s mother had told it to her more than 40 years earlier. He admits to changing the ending of the story. In the original, the boy liked to carve wood and just happened to have a carved wooden leg in his pocket. Jacobs thought that this was too much of a coincidence, even for a folktale. However, I am not sure that his new ending is any more believable. It also seems that Mr. Miacca wasn’t just a bad guy. As well as punishing bad children by eating them, he is said to have rewarded good children by leaving gifts. The woman who told Jacobs the story remembered a time in her childhood when she thought she saw Mr. Miacca (in the form of a passing shadow) after he had left her such a gift.
Original Text / PDF (640 words)