It is the 22nd April 1833 and Hans Christian Andersen is surrounded by a crowd of people come to see him off from the harbor in Copenhagen. This is a bittersweet moment. He is twenty-eight and has been awarded a grant from the King of 600 rixdollars per annum for two years of travel. He is going to Italy, a long and arduous journey that will take him several months but will make him one of the best-travelled men in Denmark. This is the fulfillment of one of his many ambitions, and a significant step in the path to becoming the artist he wants to be.
But it is also, quietly, a banishment.
Edvard Collin is at his side as he boards the ship, submitting in a brotherly manner to Hans Christian’s arm slung around his shoulders. Edvard is the son of Andersen’s patron, Jonas Collin, and a successful man now in his own right. Hans Christian has longed for Edvard’s approval and his friendship, and he has not been able to restrain himself from longing for much more than that. He has written grovelling, pathetic letters, expressing his sincerest love, his fervent desire that they should write to each other using the intimate ‘Du’ form of address. But Edvard, whilst remaining mild and friendly, has blocked this in no uncertain terms: ‘is not our relationship very pleasant and useful to both of us as it is? Why then restart it in a new fashion, a fashion which, I suppose, is of no importance in itself but for which I have, as I have told you, a feeling of dislike.’ And of course Andersen wrote back stifling his disappointment and assuring him he understood.
But he didn’t. It rankled and he couldn’t resist poking the wound and bringing the matter up with Edvard in their correspondence, each time only adding to his sense of insecurity. ‘I feel there is something beggarly, something grim in this paining for sympathy, but my pride gives in to my love for you! I do care for you so much, and despair that you cannot, do not want to, be the friend I would be to you, if our positions were reversed… What is there in my character that you dislike?’ (116, JW)
Also on the docks is Louise Collin, Edvard’s sister. Andersen fell in love with her too, on the rebound from Edvard. He tried to attract her attention with letters, poems, and a short memoir of his life, but this time the stonewalling seemed worse than ever. Hans Christian became frantic in his letters:
‘Is there something in me which makes me so repulsive, so unworthy of your – friendship? – You and Edvard are the two people I most trust in your home, you do not mind me saying that, do you? There is nothing wrong in that. O God! I have become so anxious about any expression of my feelings, I am always frightened it will land me into trouble… O God! My dear Miss Collin, I feel so miserable – indeed, I must go far, far away.’ (114, JW)
The Collin family agreed. They had been monitoring the progress of this gentle and hopeless epistolary stalking and Jonas Collin drafted the application for Andersen’s travel grant, ensuring its success. They were not without their kindness as a family, but they were impeccable in the way that their kindnesses to Hans Christian served to close ranks against him.
Still, here they are on the quayside, and Andersen takes too much encouragement from their presence, as he always does, and believes he sees a tear in Louise’s eye. ‘They do like me after all!’ he would later write in his diary. ‘Those dear, very dear people!’ Once the ship sets sail, the captain calls on him with a letter – a farewell note from Edvard, displaying the tenderness and the casual brutality with which his family would always treat Andersen:
‘I shall miss you dreadfully, I shall miss no longer seeing you coming up to talk to me in my rooms as usual, I shall miss you at your place at the table on Tuesdays, and yet you will miss us even more, I know, because you are alone.’ (117, JW)
It was true. Hans Christian Andersen was off on a journey both geographical and spiritual that would enable him to transform these ordinary, shoddy betrayals into a tragic story that became one of the best-known fairy tales in the world. But for the rest of his life the people whose good opinion he cared for most would undervalue him, and he would be very much alone.
***
Odense in the 19th century
" data-orig-size="538,346" sizes="(max-width: 440px) 100vw, 440px" data-image-title="" data-orig-file="https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/odense.jpg" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01","orientation":"0"}" width="440" data-medium-file="https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/odense.jpg?w=300" data-permalink="https://litlove.wordpress.com/2025/02/12/a-world-of-his-own/lead-technologies-inc-v1-01/" alt="" height="282" srcset="https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/odense.jpg?w=438 438w, https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/odense.jpg?w=150 150w, https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/odense.jpg?w=300 300w, https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/odense.jpg 538w" class="wp-image-5258" data-large-file="https://litlove.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/odense.jpg?w=440" />Odense in the 19th centuryHans Christian Andersen was born into poverty. His father was a shoemaker and his mother an illiterate, superstitious woman who worked a number of jobs including washing clothes and gathering herbs. They were tenderly loving parents; ‘my father gratified me in all my wishes,’ Hans Christian wrote in his memoir. ‘I possessed his whole heart – he lived for me.’ An unusually bookish father, he read plays and tales from the Arabian Nights to his son, crafting him toy theatres and pop-up pictures. His mother only let him go to school on condition that he wouldn’t be beaten, and when he was, she promptly moved him to another. They lived in one room in the poorest part of Odense – a town known as ‘little Copenhagen’ because there was a royal summer residence there, home of the Crown Prince. Hans Christian may have grown up in the gutter, but he did so watching the comings and goings from the castle, the cathedral and, above all, the theater.
Never had voracious ambition chosen such an unlikely subject. He was a lanky child with outsized hands and feet, coloring so pale as to be almost albino and small, half—closed eyes that made people ask if he were blind. He was over-sensitive, wildly imaginative and an awful crybaby. From his earliest days, he was a performer, dancing and reciting and singing in his rather lovely soprano for his mother, liking nothing better than to dress up. When he went with his grandmother to the asylum where she worked, he would overwhelm the quieter inmates with his eloquent commentaries on subjects about which he knew nothing. This habit of self-aggrandizement took hold very young and very tenaciously. He assured one of his little school friends who wanted to become a dairymaid in a manor house that she could come and work in his castle when they grew up. When she scoffed, he drew her a picture of it; ‘I told her that I was a changed child of high birth, and that the angels of God came down and spoke to me.’ (9, HCA) Unsurprisingly, his friendship came to an abrupt end as the little girl rushed off to tell the other boys he was out of his mind. ‘I had said it to give me an air of importance in their eyes,’ he wrote in his memoir, ‘but I failed and only made them think that I was insane’. (9, HCA)
In fact his grandmother on his father’s side liked to put about a story that she descended from a rich, noble family, and she claimed to have once owned a farm with her husband that a series of disasters – cattle death, fire – had destroyed. As a result, Hans Christian believed he was a class apart, a star fallen from the firmament, but it wasn’t true. His grandmother was a fantasist, his grandfather now quite insane (and terrifying to him); his mother, he knew, had been sent out to beg as a child. Before her marriage to his father, she had an illegitimate daughter, whom Hans Christian feared would suddenly turn up in their lives, and his aunt ran a brothel in Copenhagen. Poverty, mental imbalance and promiscuity were his true background.
His father died when Hans Christian was only eleven and they had even less money than before. But when he was fourteen, the age he should have been apprenticed to a trade, he begged his mother to allow him to try his fortune on the stage in Copenhagen. He knew exactly what to do: ‘First you go through terrible suffering, and then you become famous,’ he explained to her. He reminded his mother of the prophecy that a fortune teller had foretold of his fate: ‘It will be better than he deserves,’ she had said. ‘One day the town of Odense will be illuminated in his honor.’ (21, EB). His mother, who had never been able to refuse him anything, relented. Perhaps she was also remembering the time he had been briefly apprenticed at the cloth-mill, when Hans Christian’s beautiful singing had first enthralled the workers, and then convinced them he must be a girl, which prompted some to take off his trousers and check. That had been the end of that job.
So his mother bribed the driver of the mail coach to Copenhagen to let him stow away without a ticket, and Hans Christian set off feeling exhilarated and sure his life was about to change. The driver dropped him at the outskirts of the city by the magnificent Frederiksburg castle, surrounded by two parks with waterfalls and grottos, perched on a hill overlooking the fortress town below, which was entered only by one of four gates, whose keys were kept beneath the King’s pillow at night when he slept. The Napoleonic wars had left Denmark bankrupt, its extensive naval fleet commandeered by the British, its once global trade now reduced to the Baltic and the North Sea. Now, five years after peace had been declared, the country was still licking its wounds. Defeat had turned Copenhagen in on itself, and in its apolitical atmosphere art and culture reigned supreme, the new pride and backbone of the nation. The country was on the verge of a golden age in artistic endeavour, the notion of inborn genius held romantic sway over the popular imagination, and patronage of emerging talent would be the way for the rich to gain influence and renown. The theater was the pinnacle of the performing arts, and young, star-struck Hans Christian was determined to infiltrate it. Who could blame him for scenting adventure and providence so close?
But he was a complete innocent, without cunning or guile. He rushed off to visit the lead dancer with the Royal Ballet, Madame Schall – a woman he had only heard about – whom he hoped would take him as a pupil. Her initial bafflement at this strange rustic child became alarm as Hans Christian launched into a wild, improvised dance on the spot. She had him removed from her house as a lunatic. He tried the same approach with a director and a critic but came to grief each time. At the end of his money and his wits, Andersen recalled reading the name of the head of the Royal Choir School, Guiseppe Siboni, in the local newspaper. He went to Siboni’s apartment but the housekeeper informed him there was a dinner party in progress and tried to shoo him away. Hans Christian was not to be got rid of so lightly; he poured out his life story until the housekeeper went to speak to her master. Sheer curiosity brought Siboni and his guests to the hallway and the boy was invited into the drawing room to sing. This he did, willingly, and recited a few poems and scenes from plays into the bargain. The applause from the guests encouraged him (it would never take much to encourage him), and the next day he found out that not only would Siboni give him singing lessons for free, but one of the guests, the composer C. E. F. Weyse, had had a whip-round for him. Seventy rixdollars had been collected and would be given to him in monthly instalments of ten dollars.
This began a pattern for Hans Christian, in which he managed to find a new contact to support him just as he had worn out the patience of the last one. Siboni soon dismissed him, realising that his voice was beginning to break. But Andersen persuaded the ballet school to let him in as a pupil. He found another singing master at the Royal Theatre, and an actor who helped him prepare some dramatic monologues. There was no situation in which he would not burst into song and dance, as if he were starring in his own private musical that no one else could see. And if things looked bad, he appealed to magical thinking. When his landlady decided to raise her rent beyond Andersen’s means, he sobbed his heart out. Catching sight of her late husband’s portrait hanging on the wall, he smeared his own tears over the painted eyes, in the hope a message from beyond the grave would save him. Amazingly, the fates came through.
When he had exhausted the goodwill of all the singing, dancing and acting masters he could prevail upon, he turned to writing dramas for the stage. He bombarded the Royal Theatre with scripts until it was decided something clearly had to be done about the boy. His spelling and grammar at seventeen showed that his education had been sorely lacking, and so the board of directors suggested he should be sent to a grammar school for the next three years at the public expense. Hans Christian accepted the proposal gratefully and his case was turned over to Jonas Collin, the civil servant whose job it was to secure funds from the King. Hans Christian went to see him before he left Copenhagen, and the older man said that if he had any problems he could always turn to him. Hans Christian was overwhelmed with the kindness – and the status – of his new, good ‘father’ and swore him devotion, unaware that he was being sent to meet his nemesis.
***
The grammar school in Slagelse was run by Dr Simon Meisling, a Dickensian Mr Gradgrind if ever there was one. He was a man of unpredictable mood and violent temper who taught by mockery and ridicule. It was his job to turn small boys into efficient cogs in the Danish bureaucratic system, and Andersen, with his weepy self-pity and yearning after genius was pure anathema to him. When it turned out that the boy was also particularly bad at Latin and Greek – the subjects Meisling taught – his fate was sealed. Hans Christian soon began to dread every lesson with the contemptuous Meisling, who muddled his mind with terrified anxiety.
Hans Christian’s artistic longings had coalesced into a determination to become a great poet. Meisling soon learned of his compulsion to read his writing out to anyone who would listen, and opposed this practice, ostensibly on the grounds that his pupil should be concentrating on his studies. But there was a more vindictive motivation at work. Meisling seemed determined to make Hans Christian realize that he would never amount to anything artistically, that he was simply unworthy of a writer’s career. He told him: ‘You’re a stupid boy who’ll never be any good. When you start to stand on your own legs you may scribble a lot of nonsense, but no one will read what you write, and it will be sold as pulp – For God’s sake, don’t start weeping, you overgrown fellow!’ (58, JW)
Three years of schooling became five for he was no scholar and was often held back from graduating into the next class. And in these five long years the bullying went on. Throughout this time, Hans Christian wrote endless despairing letters to the people he thought cared for him, Jonas Collin primarily, and Mrs Wulff, with whose family he stayed in the holidays (Meisling liked the boy to babysit for his children, so often cut his vacations short). But no good ever came of it; Andersen had mentors and charitable friends but none of them cared enough to do anything. Mostly, they got sick of the whining. Mrs Wulff, usually firm but motherly, wrote to him: ‘You certainly do your best to wear out your friends and I can’t believe it can bring you any amusement yourself – and all because of the ceaseless concern with YOURSELF – YOUR OWN EGO – THE GREAT POET YOU THINK YOU WILL BE. My dear Andersen! You do realize you aren’t going to be successful with all these ideas and that you are on the wrong track.’ (73, JW)
In fact the only good thing that came of those long, miserable years was a poem that Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1826, when he was 21, about a dying child. It was his own feelings of black depression that fueled it, his suicidal urges. For this would be his curse; his drama queen tendencies masked the genuine sorrow and injustice in his life. Because he could not express his woes in anything other than histrionic ways, he could never get them taken seriously, even when they were serious. But the poem was translated into German by a poet friend of Andersen’s and printed in a German newspaper in 1827 to great acclaim. Although it was published anonymously at first, it was then reprinted in the original Danish when it proved popular, giving Andersen a first taste of literary success. When he wrote it, Andersen immediately showed how he could not resist courting trouble, confessing in his diary:
‘I had the most terrible pangs of conscience: for writing poetry was something I was not allowed to do. So it eased my mind considerably when I copied it in a letter to Collin, whom I assured that it was something I could not help… I even showed it to Mr and Mrs Meisling, for it did seem to me that I had committed a sin by writing a poem’. (63, EB)
Hans Christian’s compulsion to thrust his writing upon anyone he could force to read it was a longing for acceptance and recognition that looked exactly like an urge to show off. Finally, though, a new teacher at the school noticed how Meisling treated the boy and decided to put a stop to it. He accompanied Hans Christian home, and when Jonas Collin as usual refused to listen to his complaints, insisted on an interview himself. As a result, Hans Christian was removed from the school instantly and provided with a personal tutor in Copenhagen. The days of torment were finally over, but Andersen would have nightmares about Simon Meisling for the rest of his life.
***
Henriette and Edvard Collin
Sprung from the prison of school, Hans Christian’s spirit blossomed. He scraped through his exams and then, in 1829, published his first book, a Hoffmannesque fantasy about a young poet’s night-time journey across the city, in which a series of strange events occur. Andersen refused the publisher’s cautious offer, brought the book out himself and did rather well out of it. All those years of networking had left him with a burgeoning audience of interested benefactors. Over the next few years he would try out his skills in a number of genres – publishing plays, poems, travel writings and unclassifiable sketches to a mixed reception.
When his bid for self-expression was met with tentative approval, Hans Christian couldn’t help but try to get his person accepted, too. In common with many poor students of the time, he benefited from a rota of evening meals at different, wealthy families in Copenhagen. Tuesday night was Collin night, and this was the family to whom he felt most attracted and most indebted. Of Jonas Collin he wrote, ‘I was in some way really afraid of the father, though I loved him with all my heart; my fear was due to the fact that I regarded him as my life’s destiny, indeed, my entire existence depended upon him.’ (70, EB) This had been the essence of the problem in Slagelse; he’d been so afraid of failing at the grammar school because it would disappoint his sponsors, and there was no safety net for a boy like Hans Christian. The habit of believing survival was dependent on pleasing would be a tragedy for his confidence – he would overwork his affection and loyalty towards anyone he perceived as being in authority. He even wrote in his diary to God as if He were one of his more illustrious patrons, capable, if properly petitioned, of fixing him up with favourable circumstances.
As Andersen fell in love with the whole Collin family, his feelings crystallised around Jonas’s son, Edvard. They became friends in the usual way: Hans Christian full of abject devotion, Edvard berating and lecturing him about his faults as he saw them. What could the Collins – rich, established, proud of themselves and utterly entitled – understand of Hans Christian’s life? His febrile insecurity, his strange looks, his shameful roots? In Edvard’s memoir about their friendship written after Andersen’s death, he summed up the problem in an anecdote: in later life when Hans Christian was a famous writer, Edvard watched him cross the road to an acquaintance and say, ‘Now I’m being read in Spain, well, goodbye!’ (275, EB) Edvard scolded him about his vanity from the earliest days of their acquaintance, warning him at a private party ‘If you recite so much as a single poem, I shall leave!’ Hans Christian, longing for affection and understanding and wholly committed to the friendship, tried to take Edvard’s flow of educational missives on the chin. He wrote: ‘Avidly I swallow every letter I receive, even though it may occasionally taste like medicine.’ (85, EB)
At twenty-five, Andersen was so ripe for love, as if the reserves from his childhood had finally run dry. Who was there to care for him? His real mother was dying slowly of alcoholism in an institution, and though he sent money, he never saw her. For a decade he had been utterly alone, except for the comfort of strangers. Recognition, love, tenderness, sexual pleasure were a mixed-up mess in his heart; he needed them all, but had barely experienced any of them.
He took up an invitation from a school friend, Christian Voigt, to visit him and met his sister, Riborg. She treated Andersen with gentleness and respect, having read and enjoyed his writing, and this was more than enough to catapult him into his first major, permissible crush; ‘it was as if a flame rushed through my body’ (93, JW) he wrote in his memoir. But the love he felt for Riborg undoubtedly bled over into a deeper tenderness for her brother: ‘It is as if he has cast a spell over me, I do not know how I can be so fond of him’ (94, JW) and he took every opportunity to chew over his feelings with Christian. Riborg was already engaged, and this piece of grit gave Andersen the opportunity to work his impossible mistress into a pearl. He wrote her an ambivalent letter, ostensibly longing to win her heart but full of pessimism at his chances. After the inevitable outcome he threw himself into suffering with much more enthusiasm than he had embraced courtship.
He used the event to try to whip up sympathy in Edvard: ‘last summer I met a rich, lovely, spirited girl who feels the same for me as I do for her… certain circumstances made her marry a man who took her for her fortune… I have been weeping like a child.’ (106, JW) This was a shameless distortion of the facts (apart from the weeping) but Andersen was desperate. ‘Oh Edvard!’ he wrote to him. ‘My soul yearns to be recognised like a thirsty man for water!’ (122, JW)
But no matter how ardent and demanding his letters to Edvard they could not produce reciprocated feelings. When he poured his heart out to Edvard’s sister Louise, telling her all about the situation with Riborg, she was sympathetic. This was more than enough to encourage Hans Christian to turn her into his latest object of attention, but it only made matters worse. As soon as he became his emotional, yearning self with her she clammed shut, quite unable to deal with him. And it was at this point that everyone decided it would be better if Hans Christian went abroad. When he left for Italy, it was with some relief at being extracted from a humiliating situation. But the years of unrequited love had ruined what little self-esteem he had left.
But Italy, far from being the lonely exile he feared, was a revelation. He loved the heat, the vigor, the freedom of the South. He fell in with a group of artists in Rome who teased him – for once with friendliness – about his prudishness and kept planning, without success, to get him into a brothel (at the very end of his life he would visit them to talk gently and kindly to the girls). In the warmth and light he expanded, felt every sensation heightened, his awareness deepened: ‘This is the home of fantasy, the north that of reason, but as I am a visionary, I feel most at home in my real country.’ (124, JW) For once, his external circumstances were not exerting pressure on him to change. On the journey out he had written a dramatic poem about a merman who falls in love with a young human girl. She lives with him under the sea until she is finally recalled to land, leaving him heartbroken. It was based on a Danish ballad, and he sent it off to Edvard for his comments, still longing for his approval despite everything.
When Edvard wrote back, he informed him first that his mother had finally died, and then that Agnete, his poem, was a disaster. Edvard had hoped to see the old flaws in Andersen’s writing corrected and overcome, but here they were, rearing their heads again: ‘While reading the proofs I have often been on the point of crying because I met with so many old acquaintances in Agnete whom I did not want to meet again; usually annoyance suffocated my tears…’ He spoke of ‘desperately deformed, nay, formless passages’ and said he had passed it to a friend whose verdict was ‘I cannot stand it! I find it painful to read such a mediocre product’ (111, EB) This was a heartless letter, insensitive and unnecessarily cruel. Andersen stifled his feelings about his mother and reacted strongly to the lengthy condemnation of his work. In his diary he wrote that Edvard had ‘pronounced for me the death of my reputation. Agnete was a desperately ill-conceived, mongrelized, pedestrian work. It shook me profoundly to the core of my being’ (129, JW). For weeks he was bitter and hurt but for the first time, the worm was beginning to turn. ‘It is difficult to tear oneself away from old relationships that have become oppressive, but better late than never! I won’t let Edvard dominate me any longer!’ he told his diary, firmly.
This was nonsense; Edvard would have a stranglehold over his affections for the rest of his life. Andersen wrote back to him, of course, wounded, and Edvard replied defensively; ‘My dear Andersen, is your character still so soft?’(113, EB) As usual, it was up to Hans Christian to swallow the complaints that he was ‘smug and complacent and insensitive to criticism’ (113), Edvard showing as ever a complete misunderstanding of his friend’s character and a determination that his stolid bourgeois self should always be right. Time elapsed and milder letters – forgiving on Andersen’s part – were exchanged. But something snapped, something changed in the months that he smarted in the aftermath of the letter. The death of his mother played its part, too, freeing him from some of the fetters of the past. And there was the experience of Italy: ‘I felt a strength in my soul, a clearness in my comprehension… the impression of a place and its momentary inspiration, determined the whole operation of the spirit.’ (131, JW) Italy allowed him his sensual intensity and the power to dream. In Italy he felt free to be himself in a way he never had before. At the level of his work, he was now determined to head his own way. ‘Let me follow my nature!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Why do I have to trot with the fashion? If my gait is slouching, well, that is the natural way I walk.’ (133, JW)
***
When Hans Christian Andersen began writing fairy stories in 1835, the genre had already been introduced to Europe through the assiduous research of the Grimm Brothers; but the stories they told were not for children. Andersen had been brought up hearing traditional folk tales told by his grandmother and the women at the asylum where she worked and he had loved them. He understood as no one else had before him, that these stories had the potential to reach everyone who listened to them: ‘I seize an idea for the grown-ups,’ he wrote, ‘and then tell the story to the little ones while always remembering that Father and Mother often listen, and you must also give them something for their minds.’ (151, JW) The result was a clever story told in the purest and simplest of voices, one that was colloquial and entertaining, easy, vivid, lively and humorous. In adopting this style, Andersen was breaking two major rules: the first, that children’s literature should always be morally improving; the second, that literature of any kind should be written in the heavy poetical style demonstrated by classical authors. Well, Andersen had been on the receiving end of that kind of education and his response was to bring literature to the people in a way they could appreciate.
Not for nothing had he recited his work to anyone who would hear it. Now he brought together all the tricks and delights of oral storytelling to enliven the written word. One of his translators, R. P. Keigwin, described how ‘He sprinkled his narrative with every kind of conversational touch – crisp, lively openings to catch the listener’s attention at a swoop; frequent asides or parentheses; little bits of Copenhagen slang; much grammatical licence’ (152, JW). The subsequent complaints from the critics showed just what a challenge his work presented to convention. The Danish Literary Times wrote in 1836 ‘It is not meaningless convention that one does not put words together in print in the same disordered manner as one may do quite acceptably in oral speech… What is delivered to them [the children] must always be above them, and it is also such things they rather want to hear.’ (159-60, JW) The immense popularity of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories suggested otherwise.
Andersen was the first writer to take the genre of the fairy tale and write original stories using the traditional structure. It provided him with the perfect foil for expressing the violent, emotional parts of himself that no one had wanted to hear. One of the stories in his first collection was ‘The Princess and the Pea’, in which Andersen’s own excessive sensitivity could be gently mocked as an affliction and quietly exalted as an indication of nobility. In fairy stories the stakes are raised as high as they can go; love is often a matter of life or death, misrecognition puts survival at risk, immense courage and forbearance are required to withstand the dangers in their pages. This was Hans Christian’s inner world writ large. The sense of lurking persecution which persists in all such tales had been a significant and real component of his life. The parlaying of skills or talents into safety or social advancement had been intrinsic to his early survival. The belief that fate can turn on a dime had been the truth of his youthful experiences. When he did not talk directly about himself, but translated his emotional world onto the plane of the fairy story, his sorry, striving life became beautiful, meaningful entertainment.
In 1836, while Edvard was preparing for his marriage and Hans Christian was staying with friends to avoid it, he began work on a new story, a reworking of the theme that he had tried so disastrously on his way out to Italy. This time he worked it over very carefully, reaching an epitome of both style and form, and bringing to his mythic elements more personal creativity than he ever had before. This was the first of his fairy tales that was almost entirely a work of his own imagination. He called it ‘The Little Mermaid’.
At the bottom of the sea lives the Sea-King with his six daughters, sirens whose beautiful voices soothe men as they drown. The daughters are all fascinated by life on earth, none more so than the youngest who waits avidly until she is fifteen for her first chance to glimpse the floating world. On her very first trip, she falls in love with a prince she spies celebrating his birthday on a ship. When a storm blows up, she rescues the prince from drowning, leaving him unconscious on the shore and unaware of his savior. So fierce is the mermaid’s love for the prince that she visits the sea witch to beg for the help of her black magic. The witch tells her she will make a deal: at the price of the mermaid’s exquisite voice, she will give her legs ‘but it will hurt you…every step you take will be as if you trod upon sharp knives, and as if your blood must flow.’ If the mermaid wins the love of the prince she will become human and gain an immortal soul, and if she fails, the consequence is immediate oblivion.
And so the mermaid exchanges her tongue for human legs and leaves her home beneath the sea, knowing she has banished herself forever. The mermaid quickly becomes part of the royal court, but although she makes friends with the prince and he is fond of her, he has no intention of asking her to be his wife. Instead, he becomes engaged to a princess, happily at one with his conventional fate. On the eve of his wedding, awaiting the death that is the price of her failure, the little mermaid suddenly sees her sisters swimming towards her. They have sacrificed their long and lovely hair to the sea witch in return for a magical knife. If the little mermaid kills the prince with it, she will be able to return to her family under the sea. But the mermaid cannot kill the man she loves. She willingly accepts death. But at the fatal moment, she finds she has been transformed into one of the ‘daughters of the air’. Her new companions tell her ‘you have suffered and endured; you have by good works raised yourself to the world of the spirits, and can gain an immortal soul after three hundred years.’
The poignant romanticism of this story combined with the exotic charms of the mermaid made it Andersen’s breakthrough story. It brought him international fame and the bronze statue of the mermaid in Copenhagen’s harbor remains a national monument to the city’s best-loved son. How many of Andersen’s admirers would realize that the core of the story was drawn directly from his life? In modern times, it would come to represent a disturbing trope of female submissiveness, the little mermaid sacrificing her voice, her home and eventually her life for a man who never acknowledged her. But the story of the little mermaid and her prince had grown out of the unrequited, one-sided love between Hans Christian and Edvard.
The pain of walking on knives was Andersen’s graphic metaphor for all the pain he had suffered for Edvard’s sake without the slightest recognition. The figure of the mermaid spoke to Andersen’s sense of exclusion, his realisation that he was a different creature to the Collin family, no matter what he gave up in the hope of belonging. Her fidelity spoke to his stubborn and abiding devotion to a man who cared only carelessly for him, who would never reciprocate even a part of his feelings. And the story ended on the deal that Andersen believed he was making with his fate; as the little mermaid received her promise of eternal life in recompense for the lack of earthly love, so Hans Christian came to understand that he was swapping his own sexual promise for immortality that was not just religious, but also artistic. As his biographer Jackie Wullschlager wrote ‘from 1837 until his death, he clung to the idea that his muse was his substitute for human love.’ (168)
Hans Christian Andersen went on to enjoy fame and renown of a kind that is rarely experienced in the lives of authors. He became the darling of European royalty and never had his own home, preferring to move between the estates of his noble friends and to rent rooms in Copenhagen occasionally, and this recognition brought him great pleasure. But he never had a proper love relationship. When he was in his mid 50s he had a brief fling with Harald Scharff, a pretty, pouting ballet dancer thirty years his junior, and that was it. He never lost his love for Edvard Collin, who in turn never really rated him as a writer, although he dealt prudently and unstintingly with the business side of Andersen’s career. When Hans Christian died aged 70, Edvard was his heir, although none of the Collin family came to his funeral.
After Andersen’s death, Edvard wrote a memoir about their friendship, in which he continued to show a marked lack of insight into his friend’s artistic nature. Andersen was quite right to consider himself a different breed to the bourgeois Edvard, and to fear their perspectives could never be reconciled. ‘I cannot deviate from the opinion,’ Edvard wrote, ‘that the best service to Andersen is done by showing the world how diseased a mind he had, so that it is clear to everyone, that everything repulsive, everything that the world was scandalised by, was caused by this mind.’ (164, JW) He neglected to mention that it was also the mind that brought tears and laughter and delight to millions of readers across the world.
When Edvard and his wife died they were buried in the same grave as Hans Christian Andersen, according to his long-held wish that they would be reunited in the afterlife he believed in so fervently. A few years later, both husband and wife were disinterred and moved to the Collin family plot, and Andersen faced eternity again on his own.
Works cited
Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller by Jackie Wullschlager
The Fairy Tale of my Life: An Autobiography by Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen: A Biography by Elias Bredsdorff
