Hans Christian Andersen

(1805–1875)

The Snow Queen adapted by Peter Denyer

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, 1994

The Gentle Touch of Hans Christian Andersen

“In a country such as ours, the poet is always poor. Fame is like a golden bird he tries to catch. Only time will tell whether I can catch mine by telling stories.”

It may seem a strange claim to make of the world’s most popular writer of fairy stories that his work contains a strong element of autobiography, yet everywhere you look in the tales, the man himself stands revealed. As a contemporary critic remarked, Andersen “wrote more self-portraits than Rembrandt painted”. A lifelong outsider, a watcher not a doer, he appears again and again in the stories, outwardly in different disguises, but always recognisable underneath – humble, good-hearted, at odds with his surroundings, he is the Ugly Duckling, he is the Little Mermaid, he is the faithful Gerda hunting Kay through the long years of her vanishing childhood. Like the soldier in The Tinderbox, he stepped boldly out into the world determined to win for himself a princess and half the kingdom, and as in any good fairy story his wish was granted. But he had to earn it.

Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, on 2 April 1805. The family was extremely poor and neither he nor any of his brothers and sisters received much formal education. But both parents in their own way passed on valuable lessons that were to stand the young author in good stead. Both doted on him. His father was a shoemaker, a self-taught freethinker who handed down the rudiments of his trade to his son, but who was to die worn out in his thirties when the young Hans was only 11. His mother, a rough, illiterate peasant woman, was fifteen years older than her husband, but her dogged hardworking ways were to instil in the boy the qualities of resilience, toughness and endurance.

Going to work in a local cloth mill, Hans found one way to offset the grimness of his surroundings was to entertain the local populace with stories. These he would sing at the top of his voice, making up the tunes as he went along. In time this brought him, not surprisingly, to the notice of a local councillor, Colonel Guldberg, who, impressed by Hans’s enterprise no less than by what was obviously a natural talent of some kind, arranged for him to go to school.

Progress was surprisingly slow at first. There is evidence to suggest that young Hans may even have been dyslexic. Nevertheless, it was all good experience, his horizons were broadened, so in 1819 he set off for Copenhagen – this was still the age when young hopefuls from the provinces came to the capital to seek their fortune – and like so many before him, Hans at first found the going very tough indeed. Living like a pauper he had to get by on his own wits and talent for self-promotion. By dint of luck and persistence he was able to clown, sing and joke his way into the drawing rooms of the gentry where he caught the eye of the king, among other patrons, who helped him along his way with a bed here and spot of money there. But his initial attempts to find a permanent appointment met with failure.

His father had helped him build toy theatres as a boy, and it was this which now fired his ambition. The glamour and spectacle of the professional stage must have struck the determined adolescent from the sticks as a world away from his humdrum beginnings, but although he was occasionally offered work as an extra, he was unable to persuade the management to perform any of his plays or stories. But again his efforts were not completely ignored. The director Jonas Collin undertook to further his education and help focus his gifts, and it was under Collin’s sponsorship that Hans was finally allowed to enter the University of Copenhagen.

As a student he continued to write and the unused play scripts continued to pile up. But it was to be as a novelist that he first got into print. The Improvisatore (1834) was billed as a romance, but the public did not take it to their hearts as readily as they did his next published work. Fairy Tales Told for Children (1835) consisted of four stories, three of which – The Tinderbox, Little Claus and Big Claus and The Princess and the Pea – were retellings of familiar folk myths. The fourth, Little Ida’s Flowers, was born of his own imagination.

The success of this first little booklet, barely sixty pages long, prompted him to produce more of the same. In 1836 three more tales appeared, among them Inchelina, and the following year saw The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Little Mermaid. The former was again a well-known folk tale which had had its parallels for centuries in various cultures, but the latter as all his own work. From that point on until virtually the end of his life, stories would appear in pamphlet-sized books in groups of four to six, and then every few years around Christmastime these would be gathered together into a larger bound volume. In all Andersen was to produce 156 stories, 144 of which were original. Although it had always been his intention to achieve fame through his poems and plays, it was these fairy stories that were to prove the most popular of his works.

He had chosen to recount the tales in a style that was as simple and direct as possible, to write the way an adult would speak if he were entertaining a child, and his consistently humane outlook and powers of meticulous observation enabled him to confer human life and emotions on the most workaday objects. For all the supernatural whimsy of the tales, and the “once upon a time” setting in some dim and distant legendary past, the stories are still firmly rooted in the real world. The outward trappings are invariably simple, homely and down to earth. Everyone knows what a prince and a pauper look like, just as a toad, a wheel, a windmill or a mouse are equally familiar. As for the more unearthly elements, who has never secretly wished for or at least suspected the existence of mermaids, trolls or witches?

Stories generally came to Andersen in a flash of inspiration, prompted by a single recollection, something seen in life, or the one-sentence outline suggested by a friend. “They lay in my thoughts like seeds, requiring only a gentle touch – like the kiss of s sunbeam or a drop of malice – to flower.” One of his most famous stories, for instance, The Red Shoes, grew out of a childhood memory. He received his first pair of boots for his confirmation and as he walked down the aisle of the church, they squeaked. The young Andersen remembered feeling secretly pleased because everyone would know the boots were new, but at the same time he felt guilty for thinking more about his footwear than about his Redeemer. Another time, the sculptor Thorvaldsen complimented him, “You can write about anything, even a darning needle,” so Andersen did.

As the stories accumulated, Andersen prospered and he was able to travel widely. He came into contact with some of the greatest literary and artistic figures of the day, including Dickens, with whom he stayed on a number of occasions. They were kindred spirits, though their mutual admiration is hardly to be wondered at considering they were both, to some extent, ploughing the same furrow. For his part, Andersen found inspiration wherever he went. He always wrote in Danish but in time was able to oversee the German translations of his works personally. After ten years’ continuous labour and increasing fame, he decided to drop the words “for children” from the title page of his printed works and the 1845 collection was called simply New Fairy Tales. Among these was The Ugly Duckling. In 1846 The Snow Queen appeared and in 1849 the first volume of the complete works (so far) came out, about fifty in all, embellished with 125 illustrations.

Andersen was a careful and painstaking writer, belying the apparent simplicity of his themes and effects. He would rewrite again and again until he felt he had found the correct fusion of style and content, sometimes delaying for months the actual commitment of the story to paper until he was sure it was as ripe as it was going to get. His quiet pride and the confidence he had always had in his craft explain why he felt the tales were more than pretty sops to amuse children. Late in life, on hearing that a statue had been planned to commemorate his work showing children swarming all over him, Andersen tells us that his blood boiled. “My aim is to be a poet for all ages. The childlike element is only part of the tale.”

The nature of that childlike element is an intriguing mixture of blood, gore, humour and morality. Frequently the physical sufferings Andersen describes are every bit as harrowing as those we try to protect our children from in comics and on video today. It’s as if the more awful the horrors are, the greater the catharsis will be when (or if) the protagonist survives. Gerda in The Snow Queen finds Kay in the nick of time, “almost black with cold”, and on the point of death. The Little Mermaid is less fortunate. She doesn’t just figuratively lose her voice, the undersea witch actually cuts out her tongue. And when her mermaid tail is converted into a pair of legs, every step she takes on land feels as if she is treading on knives. As for the Soldier in The Tinderbox, he is an out-and-out psychopath who rewards the witch who helped him find his fortune in the first place by cutting off her head, simply for refusing to tell him why she wants the eponymous firelighter. He then assassinates the entire royal family by setting the dogs on them when they object to his marrying their daughter (we are told they are tossed so high in the air that when they hit the ground they break into a thousand pieces), and yet the newly orphaned princess still goes ahead and marries this regicidal fiancé who slaughtered her parents, and what’s more we are led to believe they lived happily ever after… No wonder modern versions of the tales are so frequently sanitised to make them more acceptable to today’s audiences.

But in the main it is Andersen’s fundamental Christianity that invests these tales, and it is moral resolution which again and again is seen to be the saving of his characters. In The Dead Child this theme is stated categorically: “God’s will is for the best.” Only have faith, and all will be well. Not that our reward will necessarily be on this earth: Andersen believed in an afterlife because, he said, God is just. In life there are injustices – the unequal distribution of wealth, luck, goodness, talents, to name a few. God would surely not have allowed this unless he intended to make up for it later. So the Little Mermaid dies before she can marry her prince, but is turned into a spirit and achieves salvation that way. The Steadfast Tin Soldier, after many terrifying adventures throughout which his love for the ballerina never wavers, ends up being melted in a fire, never to know that the paper ballerina herself is blown into the flames on top of him and is similarly burnt to a frazzle. But his heart and her dress clasp remain inviolate and we are invited to take comfort from this symbol of their unity in death. Easier said than done, perhaps, in this heathen era.

Elsewhere, other themes recur like, for example, the rise and fall of the characters’ fortunes, the changing of status and the problems such transformations can bring. Andersen himself had to cross social barriers by sheer stubbornness and strength of character, overcoming the lowliness of his origins by grit and determination alone. Or again, a boy and girl are separated by the chance circumstances of life, one going on to glory or adventure, the other remaining ever loyal, faithful and true. In this there might be an echo of Andersen’s own attachment to opera singer Jenny Lind, ‘the Swedish Nightingale’, who never returned his love but remained a friend. (None of Andersen’s relationships with women went any further than this, and he never married.) Yet another theme is the familiar one of wishes coming true but at a price, and not in the way one might expect. But again the underlying message is clear. In The Ugly Duckling the unfortunate fowl survives his metamorphosis into glorious swan in order that Andersen may leave him “grateful for having had to endure so much because it made him appreciate his present happiness and the beauty of the world all the more”.

In short, God will provide and the Lord helps those who help themselves. Like Andersen himself, Christian by name and Christian by nature, the tales teach us that courage and self-sacrifice are the qualities that will build character and lead us to our rightful reward in the end. Forever modest, but tenacious and with an unshakeable faith in his own talent, Andersen proved in his life that those long early years of deprivation were not in vain because beauty and fame ultimately grew out of them. The stories are his legacy, their lasting renown his truest monument.

Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875 at his home in Copenhagen, aged exactly three score years and ten.