Hans Christian Andersen
Sprung From Poverty, the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen Endure
Hans Christian Andersen / Bedtime stories
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.
Born on April 2, 1805, in Odense, Denmark, Andersen grew up in stark poverty, but his father, a shoemaker, cultivated his imagination.
“On Sundays he made me panoramas, theatres, and transformation pictures, and he would read me pieces out of Holberg’s plays and stories from the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’” Andersen was quoted as saying in his obituary in The New York Times. “And those were the only moments in which I remember him as looking really cheerful, for in his position as an artisan he did not feel happy.”
Andersen found beauty in his humble surroundings.
“A single little room, its floor space almost completely taken up by the shoemaker’s workbench, the bed, and the turn-up bench on which I slept, comprised my childhood home,” he wrote in his autobiography, translated as “The Fairy Tale of My Life.” “But the walls were covered with pictures, on the chest of drawers there stood beautiful cups, glasses, and knickknacks, and above the workbench, by the window, there was a shelf with books and songs.”
Andersen was a solitary child who spent most of his time making costumes for puppets and enacting plays on a model stage his father had built for him. He headed for Copenhagen when he was just a teenager.
His first play was soon produced by a theater there, and he went on to write poems, novels and, of course, children’s stories.
The hovels of Andersen’s childhood were far behind him, but he retained his gift for spinning magic from the mundane. Many of his stories featured children who persevered in the face of ridicule, ignorance and evil.
Versions of his tales, which include “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Princess and the Pea,” remain childhood favorites. Other yarns inspired films like “The Little Mermaid,” “Thumbelina” and “Frozen,” which was originally and very loosely based on the stories he collectively titled “The Snow Queen.”
In time, Andersen became famous and traveled around Europe, meeting celebrities like Charles Dickens. So the opening line of his autobiography is hardly hyperbolic.
“My life is a lovely story,” he wrote, “happy and full of incident.”
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