Background
Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805 in Odense, Denmark. His father was a shoemaker and his mother was a washerwoman.
1860
Andersen about 1860.
1862
Hans Christian Andersen by Georg E. Hansen.
1862
Copenhagen, Denmark
Andersen in Copenhagen.
1868
Picture of Andersen.
1869
Copenhagen, Denmark
Hans Christian Andersen in Roligheden.
1869
Photo by Thora Hallager.
Hans Christian Andersen with a book.
Andersen's childhood home in Odense
Andersen at Rolighed: Israel Melchior (c. 1867)
Statue in Central Park, New York commemorating Andersen and The Ugly Duckling
Hans Christian Andersen and children.
Hans Christian Andersen.
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen by Lars Bjørnsten Odense.
(Thumbelina is about a tiny girl and her adventures with a...)
Thumbelina is about a tiny girl and her adventures with appearance- and marriage-minded toads, moles, and cockchafers. She successfully avoids their intentions before falling in love with a flower-fairy prince just her size.
https://www.amazon.com/Thumbelina-Illustrated-Hans-Christian-Andersen/dp/1727685199/?tag=2022091-20
1835
(The Tinderbox is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian ...)
The Tinderbox is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a soldier who acquires a magic tinderbox capable of summoning three powerful dogs to do his bidding.
https://www.amazon.com/Tinder-Box-Hans-Christian-Andersen-ebook/dp/B01MXGN78A/?tag=2022091-20
1835
(Eleven brothers, turned into wild swans by an evil stepmo...)
Eleven brothers, turned into wild swans by an evil stepmother, are saved by the sacrifices of their beautiful sister, Elisa.
https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Swans-Illustrated-Christian-Andersen-ebook/dp/B015G9P4OG/?tag=2022091-20
1838
(The journey of the awkward little bird - marching bravely...)
The journey of the awkward little bird - marching bravely through hecklers, hunters, and cruel seasons - is an unforgettable survival story; this blooming into a graceful swan is a reminder of the patience often necessary to discover true happiness.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/068815932X/?tag=2022091-20
1843
(When a boy is cursed with an inability to perceive goodne...)
When a boy is cursed with an inability to perceive goodness, a young girl must go on a lonely quest to restore his heart and vision and free him from captivity in the palace of the Snow Queen.
https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Queen-Original-Illustrations/dp/0615934013/?tag=2022091-20
1844
Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805 in Odense, Denmark. His father was a shoemaker and his mother was a washerwoman.
Andersen studied at local school for poor children where he received his basic education. At the age of 14 Andersen convinced his mother to let him try his luck in Copenhagen rather than be apprenticed to a tailor. For 3 years he lived in one of Copenhagen's disreputable districts.
When he was 17, a prominent government official arranged a scholarship for Andersen in order to repair his spotty education. But he was an indifferent student and was unable to study systematically. He never learned to spell or to write the elegant Danish of the period. After spending 7 years at school, mostly under the supervision of a neurotic rector who seems to have hated him, Andersen celebrated the passing of his university examinations in 1828 by writing his first prose narrative, an unrestrained satirical fantasy.
Although school was an unhappy experience for Andersen because of an unpleasant headmaster, it allowed him to be admitted to the University of Copenhagen in 1828.
In 1835 Andersen completed his first novel, The Improvisatore, and published his first small volume of fairy tales, an event that went virtually unnoticed. The Improvisatore had a finely done Italian setting and, like most of Andersen's novels, was based on his own life. It was a success not only in Denmark but also in England and Germany. He wrote five more novels, all of them combining highly artificial plots with remarkably vivid descriptions of landscape and local customs.
As a dramatist, Andersen failed almost absolutely. World fame came to Andersen in 1846 with the publication of his collected works in German, which gave him the opportunity to write an autobiography (published in both German and English in 1847). This book formed the basis of the Danish version, The Fairy Tale of My Life (1855).
Andersen began his fairy-tale writing by retelling folk tales he had heard as a child. Very soon, however, he began to create original stories, and the vast majority of his tales are original. The first volumes in 1835-1837 contained 19 tales and were called Fairy Tales Told for Children. In 1845 the title changed to New Fairy Tales. The four volumes appearing with this title contained 22 original tales and mark the great flowering of Andersen's genius. In 1852 the title was changed to Stories, and from then on the volumes were called New Fairy Tales and Stories. During the next years Andersen published a number of volumes of fairy tales, and his last works of this type appeared in 1872.
Among his most popular tales were The Ugly Duckling, The Princess and the Pea, and The Little Mermaid. At first Andersen dismissed his fairy-tale writing as a "bagatelle" and, encouraged by friends and prominent Danish critics, considered abandoning the genre. But he later came to believe that the fairy tale would be the "universal poetry" of which so many romantic writers dreamed, the poetic form of the future, which would synthesize folk art and literature and encompass the tragic and the comic, the naive and the ironic.
While the majority of Andersen's tales can be enjoyed by children, the best of them were written for adults as well and lended themselves to varying interpretations according to the sophistication of the reader. Some of the finest and richest tales, such as She Was No Good, The Old Oak Tree's Last Dream, The Shadow, The Wind Tells of Valdemar Daae and His Daughter, and The Bell, did not find their way into English-language collections. More insidious, though, were the existing translations that omitted entirely Andersen's wit and neglect those stylistic devices that carried his multiplicity of meanings. Andersen's collected tales formed a rich fictive world, remarkably coherent and capable of many interpretations. Because Andersen rarely destroyed anything he wrote, his diaries and thousands of his letters are extant.
(The journey of the awkward little bird - marching bravely...)
1843(When a boy is cursed with an inability to perceive goodne...)
1844(The Tinderbox is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian ...)
1835(After saving a prince from drowning, a mermaid princess e...)
1837(Eleven brothers, turned into wild swans by an evil stepmo...)
1838(Thumbelina is about a tiny girl and her adventures with a...)
1835(The Swineherd tells of a prince who disguised himself as ...)
1841(In The Red Shoes, a peasant girl named Karen is adopted b...)
1845(A tale of the harrowing adventures of a toy soldier who r...)
1838(The story is about a dying child's dreams and hope.)
1845
Quotations:
"Where words fail, music speaks."
"When the bird of the heart begins to sing, too often will reason stop up her ears."
"To travel is to live."
"Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead."
"Every man's life is a fairy tale, written by God's fingers."
"Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up."
"She laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart."
"Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale."
"The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things."
"Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch."
"If you looked down to the bottom of my soul, you would understand fully the source of my longing and – pity me. Even the open, transparent lake has its unknown depths, which no divers know."
"To be of use to the world is the only way to be happy."
Andersen had one skin too few; he was easily wounded or transported with joy or - even though he was a grown man - broken with tears, while his naivete would have been laughable if it had not been so disarming. He seemed to himself to be hopelessly different from other people, a freak with his immense height and the size of his hands and feet. He often joked about it.
Physical Characteristics:
Andersen was inordinately tall, like his favourite bird, the stork.
Hans Christian Andersen was born with dyslexia and, although he learned to read, he could never spell properly, and his handwritten texts were full of mistakes. As a result, his writing style remained close to the spoken language of his days and it still sounds fresh today. His publishers corrected errors but left the style untouched.
Quotes from others about the person
Heinrich Heine: "He [Hans Christian Andersen] is the perfect representation of all poets, just the way kings want them to be."
Nancy Easterlin: "Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’ draws on cultural symbols and forms that derive from innate and universal preoccupations and ways of organizing, and in so doing employs elements that arouse reader/listener emotion and thus motivate interest."
A lifelong bachelor, he was frequently in love. His three "love affairs" - the last one with the famous singer Jenny Lind - ended in nothing. This innate loneliness and sense of difference colors many of his stories.