The Booker-shortlisted author on a momentous teenage encounter with The Bone People, getting a buzz from Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla, and trying to avoid The Lorax
Daisy Johnson
Friday 13 March 2026
My earliest reading memory
Memories from my childhood are opening up as I read to my own young children at the moment. Something in the pictures of Helen Cooper’s The Bear Under the Stairs or Lane Smith’s The Big Petstakes me back to being four years old and being read to.
The British-American author on arguing about Jane Austen, the joys of Jerome K Jerome, and revising his opinion of Philip Roth
Ben Markovits
Friday 27 February 2026
My earliest reading memory
I used to read Donald Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories with my mother. It’s a classic American kids’ series about a boy detective and his brilliant sidekick, Sally, who protects him as they tackle their arch enemy, Bugs Meany, a kind of high school bully version of Professor Moriarty. We’d sit in the kitchen together and try to solve the crimes. Of course, for me it was also an opportunity to hang out with my mom. I’m one of five kids; attention was hard to come by. But I was also drawn to the picture Sobol paints of small-town all-American life, which I don’t think I ever felt a part of. We moved around too much.
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The Send Nudes author on rereading Lorrie Moore, finding Dodie Smith at the right time, and the enduring brilliance of Muriel Spark
Saba Sams
Friday 6 March 2026
My earliest reading memory
I remember reading Jacqueline Wilson aloud to my mum in the car. I think it was The Illustrated Mum. My mum couldn’t believe it was a children’s book, and I felt so proud. I always found most children’s books overly virtuous and safe, but Wilson’s never were. I love her for that.
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| Hans Christian Andersen |
[This is the third of three edited and updated excerpts from an essay entitled "Hans Christian Andersen and the Victorians," which appeared in translation in Literature, Culture and History in Victorian England: A Festschrift for Professor Matsumura (Tokyo: Eiho-sha, 1999. 68-89).]
Of Hans Christian Andersen's two hundred and more short pieces, less than twenty appeared in volumes subtitled "Told for Children," and these volumes were the first few, published when the young and impecunious Danish author was desperate for a share of the market (see De Mylius, 168-69). His dedications to Dickens soon confirmed that he had no intention of limiting his audience to children. In the event, many other eminent Victorians besides Thackeray were greatly taken with his work. Not all were put off, as Dickens eventually was, by his personal gaucheness and egotism. Indeed, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's last poem, inspired by Andersen's visit to Italy in 1861, extols him not only as a "seer" with "a poet's tongue," but also as "a man of men" ("The North and the South"). Consequently, Andersen as well as the Grimms had a pervasive and profound effect on Victorian fiction throughout the period. Fairy tales were written even by major figures like Ruskin ("The King of the Golden River") and even the major novels "are moulded by fairy-tale themes and structures" (Wullschläger 101). Like the drenched girl who knocks on the city gate in a storm at the beginning of Andersen's "The Princess and the Pea," the plainly dressed Jane Eyre wins the hero by her extraordinary sensitivity; like the ungainly chick in "The Ugly Duckling," Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss is one of many plain or tomboyish young heroines who turn into beauties. And even though successive Victorian translators sought to push his tales further and further into the nursery, one of the writers most directly influenced by Andersen was working at the very end of the period. This was Oscar Wilde, whose own fairy tales play more elaborately, sometimes less successfully, but always intriguingly on ideas, themes and motifs introduced by the Danish author.
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| Hans Christian Andersen |
The Danish writer’s behaviour on an extended visit killed the authors’ friendship, letters show
Vanessa Thorpe
Sunday 10 September 2017
It was not, to say the least, a successful visit. The burgeoning friendship between a pair of literary stars, Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, had looked set to last. But it could not survive an overlong stay by the Danish author at the British novelist’s family home in Kent. Just how bad things became, on one side at least, has been revealed by a surprisingly frank letter sold at auction on Saturday.
Hans Christian Andersen, whose fairy tales endure more than a century after his death on this day in 1875, had a childhood as difficult as those of his plucky protagonists.
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It was a Sunday morning. The bright, warm sun was shining into the room; the mild, refreshing air was streaming in through the open window and outside beneath God’s blue sky, where field and meadow stood green and in flower, all the small birds were rejoicing. While everything outside was joy and happiness, inside the house sorrow and misery resided. Even the wife, who was otherwise always of good heart, sat there at her breakfast and gazed down despondently, finally she got up and, without having tasted a bite, dried her eyes and went over towards the door.
And it really seemed as there was a curse upon this house. It was a time of scarcity in the land; trade was doing badly; taxes were becoming more and more oppressive; year by year housekeeping money grew less, and finally the only prospect left was poverty and misery. All of this had for some time depressed the man, who was otherwise an industrious and law-abiding citizen; now thinking of the future made him despair utterly, indeed, he even stated frequently that he would do himself a mischief and put an end to this miserable, hopeless life. Nothing helped, neither what his good-humoured wife said, nor the worldly and spiritual consolations of his friends – these only made him all the more taciturn and dismal. It is easy to grasp that his poor wife also ended up by losing heart. Although her despondency was of a completely different nature, as we shall soon hear.
When the man saw that his wife too was sorrowful and wanted to leave the room, he held her back and said: ‘I will not let you go out before you tell me what’s wrong with you!’
She remained silent a while longer, after which she gave a deep sigh and said: ‘Ah, dear husband, last night I dreamt that the old God was dead, and that all the angels followed him to the grave!’
‘How can you possibility believe or think such utter rubbish!’ the man replied. ‘Don’t you know that God can never die!’
Then the good woman’s face lit up with joy, and as she affectionately pressed both her husband’s hands, she exclaimed: ‘So the old God is still alive, then!’
‘Of course!’ the man answered, ‘Who could possibly doubt it!’
Then she embraced him, looked at him with gracious eyes that gleamed with trust, peace and happiness, while saying: ‘But oh, dead husband! if the old God is still alive, why do we not trust in him and rely on him! he has counted every single hair on our heads, not one strand falls out without his willing it, he clothes the lilies in the field, gives the sparrows their food and the ravens their prey!’
At these words the man felt as if scales had fallen from his eyes, and as if all the heavy bands around his heart had been loosened; for the first time in a long while he smiled and thanked his devout, dear wife for the ruse she had used to revive his dead belief in God and called back his trust. Then the sun shone in an even friendlier fashion into the room onto contented human faces, the air wafted even more refreshingly around the smiles on their cheeks, and the birds rejoiced even more loudly in their heartfelt gratitude to God.
1836
