Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen (/ˈændərsən/ AN-dər-sən; Danish: [ˈhænˀs ˈkʰʁestjæn ˈɑnɐsn̩] ; 2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, he is best remembered for his literary fairy tales.
Andersen's fairy tales, consisting of 156 stories across nine volumes, have been translated into more than 125 languages. They have become embedded in Western collective consciousness, accessible to children as well as presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers. His most famous fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Red Shoes", "The Princess and the Pea", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Little Match Girl", and "Thumbelina." Andersen's stories have inspired ballets, plays, and animated and live-action films.
Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, on 2 April 1805. He had a half sister named Karen. Andersen's father, also named Hans, considered himself related to nobility (his paternal grandmother had told his father that their family had belonged to a higher social class, but investigations have disproved these stories). Although it has been challenged, speculation suggests that Andersen was an illegitimate son of King Christian VIII. Danish historian Jens Jørgensen supported this idea in his book H.C. Andersen, en sand myte [a true myth].
Andersen was baptised on 15 April 1805 in Saint Hans Church in Odense. According to his birth certificate, which was not drafted until November 1823, six godparents were present at the baptism ceremony: Madam Sille Marie Breineberg, Maiden Friederiche Pommer, shoemaker Peder Waltersdorff, journeyman carpenter Anders Jørgensen, hospital porter Nicolas Gomard, and royal hatter Jens Henrichsen Dorch.
Andersen's father, who had received an elementary school education, introduced his son to literature, reading him Arabian Nights. Andersen's mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was an illiterate washerwoman. Following her husband's death in 1816, she remarried in 1818. Andersen was sent to a local school for poor children where he received a basic education and had to support himself, working as an apprentice to a weaver and, later, to a tailor. At 14, Andersen moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor. Having a good soprano voice, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at the theatre told Andersen that he considered Andersen a poet, and taking the suggestion seriously, Andersen began to focus on writing.
Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Danish Theatre, held great affection for Andersen and sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, persuading King Frederick VI to pay part of Andersen's education. Andersen had by then published his first story, "The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave" (1822). Though not a stellar pupil, Andersen also attended school at Elsinore until 1827.
Andersen later said that his years at this school were the darkest and most bitter years of his life. At one school, Andersen lived at his schoolmaster's home. There, Andersen was abused and was told that it was done in order "to improve his character." Andersen later said that the faculty had discouraged him from writing, which resulted in a depression.
A very early fairy tale by Andersen, "The Tallow Candle" (Danish: Tællelyset), was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012. The story, written in the 1820s, is about a candle that does not feel appreciated. It was written while Andersen was still in school and dedicated to one of his benefactors. The story remained in that family's possession until it was found among other family papers in a local archive.
In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with the short story "A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager." Its protagonist meets characters ranging from Saint Peter to a talking cat. Andersen followed this success with a theatrical piece, Love on St. Nicholas Church Tower, and a short volume of poems. He made little progress in writing and publishing immediately following these poems, but did receive a small travel grant from the king in 1833. This enabled Andersen to set out on the first of many journeys throughout Europe. At Jura, near Le Locle, Switzerland, Andersen wrote the story "Agnete and the Merman." The same year, he spent an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante, which inspired the title of "The Bay of Fables." Andersen arrived in Rome in October 1834. His travels in Italy were reflected in his first novel, a fictionalized autobiography titled The Improvisatore (Improvisatoren), published in 1835 to instant acclaim.
Fairy Tales Told for Children. First Collection (Danish: Eventyr, fortalt for Børn. Første Samling.) is a collection of nine fairy tales by Andersen. The tales were published in a series of three installments by C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen between May 1835 and April 1837. They were Andersen's first venture into the fairy tale genre.
The first installment was a volume of sixty-one unbound pages published 8 May 1835 containing "The Tinderbox", "Little Claus and Big Claus", "The Princess and the Pea" and "Little Ida's Flowers". The first three tales were based on folktales Andersen had heard in his childhood. The fourth was Andersen's creation for Ida Thiele, the daughter of folklorist Just Mathias Thiele, Andersen's early benefactor. Reitzel paid Andersen thirty rigsdalers for the manuscript, and the booklet was priced at 24 shillings.
The second booklet was published on 16 December 1835 and contained "The Naughty Boy", and "The Traveling Companion", and "Thumbelina." The lattermost was inspired by "Tom Thumb" and other stories of miniature people. "The Naughty Boy" was based on a poem about Eros from the Anacreontea, and "The Traveling Companion" was a ghost story Andersen had experimented with in the year 1830.
The third booklet contained "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes", and it was published on 7 April 1837. The former was influenced by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine (1811) and legends about mermaids. This tale established Andersen's international reputation. The only other tale in the third booklet was "The Emperor's New Clothes", which was based on a medieval Spanish story with Arab and Jewish origins. On the eve of the third installment's publication, Andersen revised the conclusion (in which the Emperor simply walks in procession) to its now-famous finale of a child calling out, "The Emperor is not wearing any clothes!"
Danish reviews of the first two booklets first appeared in 1836 and were not enthusiastic. The critics disliked the chatty, informal style and apparent immorality, since children's literature was meant to educate rather than to amuse. The critics discouraged Andersen from pursuing this type of style. Andersen believed that he was working against the critics' preconceived notions about fairy tales, and he temporarily returned to novel-writing, waiting a full year before publishing his third installment.
The nine tales from the three booklets were published in one volume and sold for seventy-two shillings. A title page, a table of contents, and a preface by Andersen were published in this volume.
In 1868, Horace Scudder, the editor of Riverside Magazine For Young People, offered Andersen $500 for 12 new stories. Sixteen of Andersen's stories were published in the magazine, and 10 of them appeared there before they were printed in Denmark.
In 1851, Andersen published In Sweden, a volume of travel sketches. The publication received wide acclaim. A keen traveler, he published several other long travelogues: Shadow Pictures of a Journey to the Harz, Swiss Saxony, etc. etc. in the Summer of 1831, A Poet's Bazaar, In Spain, and A Visit to Portugal in 1866. (The last one describes his visit with his Portuguese friends Jorge and José O'Neill, whom Andersen knew in the mid-1820s while he was living in Copenhagen.) In his travelogues, Andersen used contemporary conventions related to travel writing but developed the style to make it his own. Each of Andersen's travelogues combines documentary and descriptive accounts of his experiences, adding additional philosophical passages on topics such as authorship, immortality, and fiction in literary travel reports. Some of the travelogues, such as In Sweden, contain fairy tales.
In the 1840s, Andersen's attention returned to the theatre stage, but with little success. He had better luck with the publication of the Picture-Book without Pictures (1840). Andersen started a second series of fairy tales in 1838 and a third series in 1845. At this point, he was celebrated throughout Europe, although Andersen's native Denmark still showed some resistance to his pretensions.
Between 1845 and 1864, Andersen lived at Nyhavn 67, Copenhagen, where a memorial plaque is now placed.
Patrons of Andersen's writings included the monarchy of Denmark, the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. An unexpected invitation from King Christian IX to the royal palace entrenched Andersen's folklore in Danish royalty as well as making its way to the Romanov dynasty when Christian IX's daughter Maria Feodorovna married Alexander III of Russia.
In June 1847, Andersen visited England for the first time, enjoying triumphant social success. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her parties where many intellectuals would meet, and at one such party he met Charles Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the veranda, which Andersen noted 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 authors respected each other's work and each other as writers, and had in common their depictions of the underclass, who often led difficult lives affected both by the Industrial Revolution and by abject poverty.
In 1857, Andersen visited England again, primarily to meet Dickens. Andersen extended the 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 told to leave, Dickens gradually stopped all correspondence between them, to Andersen's great disappointment and confusion; he had enjoyed the visit and never understood why his letters went unanswered.
It is suspected that Dickens modelled the physical appearance and mannerisms of Uriah Heep from David Copperfield after Andersen.
In Andersen's early life, his private journal records his refusal to have sexual relations.
Andersen experienced homosexual attraction; he wrote to Edvard Collin: "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench ... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery." Collin wrote in his own memoir, "I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering." Andersen's infatuation with Karl Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, did result in a relationship:
There is a sharp division in opinion over Andersen's physical fulfillment in the sexual sphere. Jackie Wullschlager's biography maintains he was possibly lovers with Danish dancer Harald Scharff [da] and Andersen's "The Snowman" was inspired by their relationship. Scharff first met Andersen when the latter was in his 50s. Andersen was infatuated and Wullschlager sees his journals as implying that their relationship was sexual. Scharff had various dinners alone with Andersen and gifted a silver toothbrush to Andersen on his 57th birthday. Wullschlager asserts that in the winter of 1861–62, the two men entered an affair that brought Andersen "joy, some kind of sexual fulfillment, and a temporary end to loneliness." He was not discreet in his conduct with Scharff, and displayed his feelings openly. Onlookers regarded the relationship as improper and ridiculous. In his diary in March 1862, Andersen referred to this time in his life as his "erotic period." On 13 November 1863, Andersen wrote, "Scharff has not visited me in eight days; with him it is over." He took this calmly and the two thereafter met in overlapping social circles without bitterness, though Andersen attempted to rekindle their relationship many times without success. According to Wullschlager, "Andersen's diaries leave no doubt that he was attracted to both sexes; that at times he longed for a physical relationship with a woman and that at other times he was involved in physical liaisons with men." For example, Wullschlager quotes from Andersen's diaries:
The claim that Andersen entertained "physical liaisons" with men has been contested by Klara Bom and Anya Aarenstrup from the H. C. Andersen Centre of University of Southern Denmark. They state:
Wullschlager, in fact, argued that, because of moral and religious ideas of his time, Andersen could not be open about his homosexual relationships.
Andersen also fell in love with unattainable women, and many interpret references to them in his stories. At one point, Andersen wrote in his diary: "Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!" A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of Andersen's youth. A small pouch containing a long letter from Voigt was found on Andersen's chest when he died, several decades after Andersen first fell in love with her. Other disappointments in love included Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted; and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin. One of Andersen's stories, "The Nightingale", was written as an expression of his passion for Jenny Lind and was the inspiration for her nickname, the "Swedish Nightingale." Andersen was shy around women and had extreme difficulty proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to go to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings towards him were not the same; she saw Andersen as a brother, writing to him in 1844: "farewell ... God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny." It is suggested that Andersen expressed his disappointment by portraying Lind as the eponymous antihero of "The Snow Queen."
In early 1872, at the age of 67, Andersen fell out of his bed and was severely hurt; Andersen never fully recovered from the resultant injuries. Soon afterward, he started to show signs of liver cancer.
Andersen died on 4 August 1875 at the age of 70 in a country house called Rolighed (literally: calmness) near Copenhagen, the home of his close friends, the banker Moritz G. Melchior and his wife. Shortly before his death, Andersen consulted a composer about the music for his funeral, saying: "Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps."
Andersen's body was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro area of Copenhagen, in the Collin family plot. In 1914, the headstone was moved to another cemetery (today known as "Frederiksbergs ældre kirkegaard"), where younger Collin family members were buried. For a period, his, Edvard Collin's, and Henriette Collin's graves were unmarked. A second stone has been erected, marking Andersen's grave, now without any mention of the Collin couple, but all three still share the same plot.
At the time of his death, Andersen was internationally revered, and the Danish government paid him an annual stipend for being a "national treasure."
Andersen's stories laid the groundwork for other children's classics, such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by A. A. Milne. The trope of inanimate objects, such as toys, coming to life (as in "Little Ida's Flowers") would later also be used by Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter.
For opera and ballet see List of The Little Mermaid Adaptations
Andersen's fairy tales include:
The Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense has a large digital collection of Hans Christian Andersen papercuts, drawings, and portraits.