| Hans
Christian Andersen was born at Odense on
the Danish island of Funen (Fyn) on April 2, 1805, to
poor parents. His father, Hans Andersen, who was aged
22 at the time, was a shoemaker; his mother, fifteen
years older, was of peasant stock. Hans Christian was
born two months after their marriage.
The family lived in a single room that was also the
shoemaker's workshop. The poverty hardly needs to be
stressed, but there were compensating benefits in the
child's environment. The marriage apparently was a happy
one; the wife, though illiterate and exceedingly superstitious,
cherished her only son (she had had an illegitimate daughter
by another man), and the shoemaker fairly doted on him.
Bitterly discontented with his lot, skeptical in religion
and politically radical, he had acquired a little self-education
and possessed a few books. One of his chief delights
was to read these to the boy.
Odense was perhaps not too
bad a place to be born in at that time. With only 5,000
inhabitants, it was provincial and old-fashioned, preserving
many ancient folk ways and traditions; but at the same
time, as the country's second city, with no less than
the Crown Prince himself as the resident governor, it
had a certain social and cultural ambiance and was warmly
self-contained.
Early efforts
Hans Christian attended briefly local charity schools,
but was for much of his time in the care of his Paternal
grandmother, a mildly eccentric women with pretensions
to gentility. His father died when he was eleven years
old, and his mother remarried. She wanted him to become
a tailor, but he was set on joining the theatre; and
as he had a good singing voice, which had attracted local
attention, she allowed him to go at the age of 14 to Copenhagen where
benefactors enabled him to get some training. Failing
after three years of hard struggle to obtain a footing
in the theatre as an actor or singer, he found other
patrons, who got him a place at a state grammar school,
and eventually he succeeded in gaining the university
entrance examination.
He was already writing poems and plays, and in 1829,
aged 24, his first book was published, a whimsical collection
of sketches loosely strung together In the form of a
mock travel book. That same year In managed to get a
play produced; it was a parody of the heroic style of
drama.
First foreign travels
In 1831 he made the first of many journeys abroad, traveling
in northern and central Germany. The fruit of this journey
was a vivid travel book, Shadow Pictures of a Journey
to the Harz Mountains and Saxony. Two years later
he published Collected Poems. He continued to
write both poems and plays the rest of his life. Some
of the plays got performed, but they are mostly of little
merit and have been largely forgotten, as also has the
bulk of his poetry, though a few fine songs and lyrics
have found a permanent place in Danish anthologies.
In 1833 Andersen, with the help of a public grant,
set out on an extended tour of Italy, traveling via the
Rhine, Paris and Switzerland. Among other places, he
visited Florence, Naples, Pompeii and Paestum, basing
himself on Rome, where altogether he spent six months.
While there he started on his first novel, The Improvisatore,
which was published In 1835. It describes the rise of
a poor boy, an Italian improvising poet of the market
place, to fame and fortune, set against a colourful background:
Italy of the romantic movement. It was Andersen's own
life story as he intended it should be. The book was
an instant success in Denmark and
established him as a major European author at a stroke
when it was translated soon after into German. It also
established him in England when it was published there
(the first of his works to appear in English) ten years
later.
The first fairy tales
A few weeks after The Improvistore, Andersen
published the first of his fairy tales, a little volume
of four: 'The Tinder
Box,' 'Little
Claus and Big Claus,' 'The
Princess on the Pea' and 'Little Ida's Flowers'.
Seldom has a major literary breakthrough seemed so inauspicious.
The small booklet of 64 pages that came out on May 8,
1835, was badly printed on poor paper, and the tales
were condemned for their violence and questionable morals.
Even the least critical reviewers thought that the author
of The Improvisatore was wasting his time on such
trifles. More perceptive than they, the physicist Hans
Christian Orsted, the discoverer of electro-magnetism,
told Andersen that if the novel had made him famous,
the fairy tales would make him immortal: an opinion which
Andersen himself did not share to begin with.
Two more novels followed soon after: 0. T.(1836) and
Only a Fiddler (1837). Like the first, both are transparently
autobiographical, but this time were set in Denmark.
They were published together in England in the same year
as The Improvisatore: and as that had been sub-titled
'Life in Italy'. these were given the common sub-title
'Life in Denmark'.
Andersen published three further novels: The Two
Baronesses (1848), Be or Not to Be (1857),
and Lucky Peter (1870). There is a good deal
of autobiographical material in all of them. The
Two Baronesses, with The Improvisatore perhaps
the best of Andersen's novels, owed some of its inspiration
to the works of Sir Walter Scott,
which Andersen greatly admired, and particularly to The
Heart of Midlothian, his favourite novel.
Abroad once more
In 1841 Andersen, the compulsive traveller, set out
an the longest of his journeys abroad, one that was to
take nine months, to Italy, Greece, Rumania and Turkey.
South-east Europe was at the time Part of the Ottoman
Empire and was little known in the West. It was a laborious
and exhausting journey often under primitive and sometimes
hazardous conditions in areas where the Greeks were fighting
for their independence. To have carried through such
a Journey at all is an Indication of Andersen's determination
when once he had set his mind on a thing, because he
was always a timorous man. For Example, his luggage included
a coil of rope for use as a possible fire escape. The
journey is the subject of his most inspired travel book, A
Poet's Bazaar.
He wrote three more travel books: In Sweden (1851), In
Spain (1863) and A Visit to Portugal, 1866
(1868). He also paid two visits to England, which he
described in his autobiography, The Fairy Tale of
My Life (1855) and its posthumous sequel (1877).
The first of these visits was made in 1847 at the invitation
of William Jerdan, editor
of The Literary Gazette, who was Andersen's
principal promoter in London. It was two years after
the publication of his first novels and fairy tales
in England and he was the object of much flattering
attention by London society, both at a grand party
given by Lord Palmerston and in Lady Blessington's
literary salon, where he met Charles
Dickens. From London he went on to Edinburgh, toured
the Highlands, visiting Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine,
and sailed on the Clyde. On the way home he visited
Dickens at
Broadstairs. He spent the five weeks of his second
visit, in 1857, as Dickens's
guest at Gad's Hill Place in Kent.
More fairy tales
Although Andersen's travel books, like his novels, were
much read in his lifetime, and still make lively reading
today, it is, as Orsted foresaw,
the fairy tales that have won him a lasting place in
world literature. They have been translated into a hundred
languages, and there can be very few people in the Western
world who are not familiar with at least a few of them,
though they may not always be the best and will frequently
be in mutilated and even bowdlerized form, or 're-tellings'.
A second little volume followed the first later in
the same year. None came out the following year, but
from 1837 on a new volume was published almost every
year, at about Christmas, while Andersen lived. There
are 156 of them altogether. Two collected editions were
published in Andersen's lifetime, in 1862 and 1874.
The immediate sources of many of them are not difficult
to trace, partly by means of Andersen's autobiography,
which he wrote in several variations, and partly through
the voluminous diaries that he kept during most of his
adult life (and that have been published in full for
the first time for the centenary). The models were 'The
Arabian Nights' and other tales which his father
had read to him as a child (the influences of the former
on tales like 'The
Tinder Box' and 'The
Flying Trunk' is fairly obvious); the Danish folk
tales that he heard told by the inmates of the local
workhouse, where his grandmother helped to look after
the garden ('Little
Claus and Big Claus' and 'The
Swineherd'); the German folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers
('The Red Shoes'):
and the tales and romances of German writers like Hoffmann, Tieck and Chamisso ('Little
Ida's Flowers'. 'Thumbelina',
'The Shadow').
Autobiographical sources
More than anything, however, the fairy tales grew out
of Andersen's own experience. To quote a Danish scholar
(Hans Brix): 'In every one of them there is a drop of
the writer's heart's blood, and that is why they remain
fresh and alive while innumerable attempts to imitate
them have failed.'
'The Little
Mermaid' is about Andersen himself, as also is
'The Fir Tree',
a finer tale, which projects his nagging sense of deprivation.
Many tales are, or incorporate, replies to critics
('The Flying
Trunk', 'Hitting on an Idea'). Others are rationalizations
of his own condition ('Sweethearts',
or 'The Top
and the Ball', in which he is the top that goes
on spinning, while the ball that rejected it lies sopping
in the gutter). The most clear-cut example of an autobiographical
tale, and the best known, is 'The
Ugly Ducking', about the poor rejected creature
that turns out to be a swan.
There are idealized self-portraits in tale after tale,
as, for instance, in 'The
Tinder Box', 'Little
Claus and Big Claus'. 'The
Steadfast Tin Soldier' and 'The
Swineherd', in which the hero (Andersen) triumphs
over every opponent and in the end wins the princess,
as in the literal sense he never did.
Not that he did not try. He fell in love three times
at least, finally, in his middle years, with Jenny
Lind, 'the Swedish nightingale', who insisted on
calling him 'brother'. They had a lot in common. She
had come through poverty and neglect and with her natural
art had triumphed over the artificial conventions of
the time just as he had done. And so 'The
Nightingale', which artistically is one of the most
perfect of Andersen's fairy tales, is partly a tribute
to the woman he loved. But it is far more than that.
It is a literary allegory and a prose poem about life
and art - true art and false.
Andersen never married. He remained a lonely bachelor
to the end. Among many other self-projections in the
fairy tales he is the old poet struck through the heart
by Cupid in 'The
Naughty Boy', the solitary old man in 'The
Old House', the sad old maid in 'The
Bottle Neck', 'The
Snowman', melting in its love for the stove, and
'The Butterfly'
that flits from flower to flower.
Still, fame and fortune came to the poor boy from the
provinces. He stayed, an honoured guest, in the country
houses of the aristocratic rich and became a friend of
kings and princes. On his seventieth birthday the town
of Odense was illuminated in
his honour, as the local wise woman had prophesied to
his mother it would, many years before (though the prophesy,
it must be said, had been well advertised).
Andersen's fairy tales and stories (he distinguished
between the two as the later tales grew in length into
short stories) were never simple pieces told only for
children, who indeed cannot fully understand them. He
took the primitive folk tale and transformed and transmuted
it, putting into it his own deeply felt experience and,
in his finest works ('The
Nightingale', 'The
Bell', 'The Shadow',
'The Snow Queen',
among others) producing works of art that will live as
long as tales are told, by reason, not least, of their
ripe wisdom and delicious wit.
Reginald Spink
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