Hans Christian Andersen

• 1. Introduction

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  Hans Christian Andersen wrote 156 fairy tales across nine volumes, and they have since been translated into more than 125 languages. He was born in Odense, Denmark, on the 2nd of April 1805, the son of an illiterate washerwoman named Anne Marie Andersdatter. Yet the writer the world remembers for "The Little Mermaid" and "The Snow Queen" began as a teenager chasing a stage career in Copenhagen. He was prolific in plays, travelogues, novels, and poems. Still, it is the tales that embedded themselves in Western collective consciousness. How did a poor boy from a provincial Danish town reach the courts of kings and the parlours of London? What did his earliest critics make of him? And what did he keep hidden in his diaries about love? A small pouch with a long letter from a woman named Riborg Voigt was found on his chest when he died. The questions that follow live inside details like that one.

• 2. From Odense To The Stage

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  Andersen's father, also named Hans, had received only an elementary education, yet he read his son Arabian Nights. The father believed himself related to nobility, after his own mother claimed the family had once belonged to a higher social class. Investigations later disproved these stories. There has even been speculation, though challenged, that Andersen was an illegitimate son of King Christian VIII. Danish historian Jens Jorgensen supported that idea in his book H.C. Andersen, en sand myte.

  Following the death of Andersen's father in 1816, his mother remarried in 1818. The boy attended a local school for poor children and had to support himself, apprenticing first to a weaver and then to a tailor. At 14, Andersen moved to Copenhagen to seek work as an actor. His good soprano voice won him a place at the Royal Danish Theatre, but the voice soon changed. A colleague there told him he considered him a poet, and Andersen took the remark seriously enough to turn toward writing.

  Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Danish Theatre, held great affection for Andersen and sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse. Collin persuaded King Frederick VI to pay part of the education. By then Andersen had published his first story, "The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave," in 1822. He also attended school at Elsinore until 1827. He later called these the darkest and most bitter years of his life, recalling abuse from a schoolmaster who said it was done "to improve his character."

• 3. Nine Tales In Three Booklets

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  Fairy Tales Told for Children, First Collection gathered nine tales that Andersen released in three installments through publisher C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen between May 1835 and April 1837. The first booklet, sixty-one unbound pages published on the 8th of May 1835, held "The Tinderbox," "Little Claus and Big Claus," "The Princess and the Pea," and "Little Ida's Flowers." The first three drew on folktales Andersen had heard in childhood. The fourth he created for Ida Thiele, daughter of folklorist Just Mathias Thiele. Reitzel paid thirty rigsdalers for the manuscript, and the booklet sold for 24 shillings.

  The second booklet, published on the 16th of December 1835, contained "The Naughty Boy," "The Traveling Companion," and "Thumbelina." The last was inspired by "Tom Thumb" and other stories of miniature people. "The Naughty Boy" drew on a poem about Eros from the Anacreontea, and "The Traveling Companion" was a ghost story Andersen had experimented with in 1830.

  The third booklet appeared on the 7th of April 1837, holding "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes." The mermaid tale, influenced by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque's Undine of 1811, established Andersen's international reputation. "The Emperor's New Clothes" came from a medieval Spanish story with Arab and Jewish origins. On the eve of publication, Andersen revised its ending so a child calls out, "The Emperor is not wearing any clothes!"

• 4. Working Against The Critics

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  Danish reviews of the first two booklets first appeared in 1836, and they were not enthusiastic. Critics disliked the chatty, informal style and what they saw as immorality, since children's literature was meant to educate rather than amuse. They discouraged Andersen from continuing in this vein. He believed he was working against their preconceived notions about fairy tales, and he waited a full year before releasing the third installment, returning temporarily to novels. When the nine tales were collected into one volume with a preface, it sold for seventy-two shillings.

  Abroad, the reception ran differently. In 1868, Horace Scudder, editor of Riverside Magazine For Young People, offered Andersen 500 dollars for 12 new stories. Sixteen of Andersen's stories ran in the magazine, and 10 of them appeared there before they were printed in Denmark.

  "The Tallow Candle," written in the 1820s while Andersen was still in school, was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012. The story of a candle that does not feel appreciated had been dedicated to one of his benefactors. It stayed in that family's possession until it surfaced among other family papers in a local archive.

• 5. A Traveler And His Patrons

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  In 1833 a small travel grant from the king let Andersen set out on the first of many journeys across Europe. At Jura, near Le Locle in Switzerland, he wrote "Agnete and the Merman." That same year, an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante inspired the title "The Bay of Fables." He reached Rome in October 1834, and his Italian travels fed his first novel, the fictionalized autobiography The Improvisatore, published in 1835 to instant acclaim.

  In 1851 Andersen published In Sweden, a volume of travel sketches that won wide acclaim. A keen traveler, he produced several other long travelogues, including A Poet's Bazaar, In Spain, and A Visit to Portugal in 1866. That last one describes a visit with his Portuguese friends Jorge and Jose O'Neill, whom he had known in the mid-1820s in Copenhagen. His travel writing wove documentary description together with philosophical passages on authorship, immortality, and fiction.

  Between 1845 and 1864, Andersen lived at Nyhavn 67 in Copenhagen, where a memorial plaque now stands. His patrons included the Danish monarchy, the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. An unexpected invitation from King Christian IX brought his folklore into Danish royalty. It reached the Romanov dynasty too, after Christian IX's daughter Maria Feodorovna married Alexander III of Russia.

• 6. The Dickens Friendship

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  In June 1847 Andersen visited England for the first time and enjoyed triumphant social success. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her gatherings of intellectuals, and at one such party he met Charles Dickens. They shook hands and walked to the veranda, a moment Andersen recorded in his diary: "We were on the veranda, and I was so happy to see and speak to England's now-living writer whom I do love the most." The two respected each other's work, and both depicted the underclass affected by the Industrial Revolution and abject poverty.

  In 1857 Andersen returned to England chiefly to see Dickens. He stretched a planned brief visit to Dickens' home at Gads Hill Place into a five-week stay, much to the distress of Dickens' family. After Andersen was finally told to leave, Dickens gradually stopped all correspondence, to Andersen's great disappointment and confusion. He had enjoyed the visit and never understood why his letters went unanswered. It has been argued that Dickens modelled the appearance and mannerisms of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield after Andersen.

• 7. Longing And The Diaries

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  Andersen's private journal records, in his early life, his refusal to have sexual relations. He also experienced homosexual attraction, writing to Edvard Collin: "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench... my sentiments for you are those of a woman." Collin recalled being unable to respond, noting this caused the author much suffering. Of his infatuation with Karl Alexander, hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Andersen wrote of being kissed lovingly and feeling "like a fairy tale."

  Opinion divides sharply over Andersen's physical fulfillment. Biographer Wullschlager reads his journals as implying a sexual relationship with Danish dancer Harald Scharff, whom he first met in his 50s. Scharff gave him a silver toothbrush on his 57th birthday. Wullschlager places an affair in the winter of 1861-62, bringing Andersen "joy, some kind of sexual fulfillment, and a temporary end to loneliness." In March 1862 Andersen called this his "erotic period." On the 13th of November 1863 he wrote, "Scharff has not visited me in eight days; with him it is over." Klara Bom and Anya Aarenstrup of the H. C. Andersen Centre contest the claim of physical liaisons, saying he had none and that it would have run against his moral and religious ideas.

  Andersen also loved unattainable women. Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of his youth. Other disappointments included Sophie Orsted, daughter of physicist Hans Christian Orsted, and Louise Collin, youngest daughter of Jonas Collin. He wrote "The Nightingale" as an expression of his passion for Jenny Lind, the inspiration for her nickname the "Swedish Nightingale." Shy around women, he handed Lind a letter of proposal as she boarded a train. She saw him as a brother, writing in 1844 of "his affectionate sister, Jenny."

• 8. A National Treasure

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  In early 1872, at the age of 67, Andersen fell out of his bed and was severely hurt, never fully recovering from the injuries. He soon began to show signs of liver cancer. He died on the 4th of August 1875 at the age of 70, in a country house called Rolighed near Copenhagen, the home of his close friends the banker Moritz G. Melchior and his wife. Shortly before, he asked a composer about the music for his funeral: "Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps."

  His body was interred in the Assistens Kirkegard in the Norrebro area of Copenhagen, in the Collin family plot. In 1914 the headstone was moved to another cemetery, where younger Collin family members were buried. At the time of his death he was internationally revered, and the Danish government paid him an annual stipend as a "national treasure."

  His reach kept widening after death. His stories laid the groundwork for later children's classics, including The Wind in the Willows of 1908 by Kenneth Grahame and Winnie-the-Pooh of 1926 by A. A. Milne. His birthday, the 2nd of April, is now celebrated as International Children's Book Day. The year 2005, the bicentenary of his birth, was designated "Andersen Year" in Denmark and marked around the world. Even a flatworm, Collastoma anderseni, carries his name.