Hans Andersen: Selected Fairy Tales

William Collins

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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2014

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Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary

Cover by e-Digital Design

Cover image: Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75) (colour litho), Hardy, E. S. (19th century) / Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007558155

Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007558162

Version: 2014-07-30

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It is almost impossible nowadays to pass through childhood without the companionship of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale creations: the plucky Ugly Duckling, the beautiful Little Mermaid, the foolish Emperor in his ‘new clothes’. A welcome salve to the gorier excesses of the Brothers Grimm, Andersen has for almost two centuries enchanted children – and adults – as a satirist, teller of fantastical tales, moral guide and bringer of hope into the bleakest of beginnings. But for one so treasured by his readers, Andersen led a life of remarkable solitude: he dragged himself from rags to riches and drew widely on the experience in his stories, but he was never able to shake off the mantle of lonely eccentric – a man much admired but rarely loved. His was, in effect, a fairy tale without the happy ending.

Andersen knew he had made it as a writer during an 1847 visit to England, where he was invited to a grand society party and introduced to Charles Dickens. The great novelist, described in Andersen’s diary as ‘the living English writer whom I love the most’, appeared just as captivated by his Danish counterpart and the two began a correspondence that lasted ten years.

As an author, Andersen shared a number of themes with Dickens – notably childhood, poverty, social injustice and reversals of fortune – and in later life both men carved out second careers giving wildly popular public readings, but Andersen had in addition suffered an upbringing worthy of a Dickensian hero. Born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805, he was the only child of a shoemaker and a washerwoman of no fixed address. He made sporadic appearances at charity schools until the age of eleven, when he was forced by his father’s death to find work, first at a cloth mill and then a tobacco factory. Determined to escape the crippling poverty into which he had been born, he stowed away in a wagon bound for Copenhagen at the age of just fourteen, hoping to find his fortune.