Hans Christian Andersen

Based on Wikipedia: Hans Christian Andersen

A small leather pouch hung around Hans Christian Andersen's neck for decades. When he died in 1875, attendants found it still there, pressed against his chest. Inside was a letter from a woman named Riborg Voigt—the unrequited love of his youth, whom he had never stopped carrying with him.

This image tells you almost everything you need to know about the man who gave us "The Little Mermaid," "The Ugly Duckling," and "The Snow Queen." Andersen was someone who felt things intensely, loved people who could not love him back, and transformed that longing into stories that have shaped how millions of children first encounter wonder, heartbreak, and hope.

The Shoemaker's Son

Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805, in Odense, Denmark—a town of narrow streets and modest expectations. His father, also named Hans, was a shoemaker who could barely support the family. His mother, Anne Marie, was illiterate and worked as a washerwoman. They lived in a single room.

But within that cramped space, something remarkable happened. The elder Hans, despite his elementary education, read aloud to his son from Arabian Nights—those sprawling tales of genies and magic carpets, of princes disguised as beggars and wishes that came with terrible prices. The stories planted seeds.

There were whispers about Andersen's true parentage. His grandmother had hinted that the family came from higher social standing. Some historians have even suggested he was the illegitimate son of King Christian VIII of Denmark. The evidence is circumstantial at best, but what matters is that Andersen himself seemed to believe he was meant for something greater than the life his circumstances dictated.

When his father died in 1816, eleven-year-old Hans was thrust into the world of work. He apprenticed to a weaver, then a tailor. Neither stuck. At fourteen, with little more than dreams and a good singing voice, he moved to Copenhagen to become an actor.

The Awkward Outsider

Picture a gangly teenager arriving in the capital city, knowing no one, with almost no money and an accent that marked him as provincial. Andersen auditioned for the Royal Danish Theatre and was accepted—his soprano voice opened the door. But puberty soon closed it. When his voice changed, his theatrical career seemed over before it began.

A colleague at the theatre offered an offhand comment that would redirect everything. He told Andersen that he considered him a poet.

Andersen took this seriously. Deadly seriously.

He began writing. Jonas Collin, the director of the Royal Danish Theatre, recognized something in this strange young man and became his patron. Collin convinced King Frederick VI to help pay for Andersen's education, sending him to grammar school in Slagelse and later Elsinore.

These school years, Andersen would later say, were "the darkest and most bitter years of his life." He was older than his classmates, painfully sensitive, and clearly different. At one school, he lived with the schoolmaster, who abused him under the guise of "improving his character." The faculty discouraged his writing. He fell into depression.

But he kept writing anyway.

The Wanderer Finds His Voice

Andersen's first real success came in 1829 with a short story called "A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager." The title alone suggests the whimsy inside—a protagonist who encounters Saint Peter and a talking cat on what should be an ordinary walk. Readers loved it.

Then came a small travel grant from the king in 1833. It doesn't sound like much, but for Andersen, it was everything. He left Denmark and discovered Europe.

In the Swiss Jura mountains, near a town called Le Locle, he wrote "Agnete and the Merman." On the Italian coast, at a village called Sestri Levante, he spent an evening that would inspire "The Bay of Fables." By October 1834, he reached Rome.

Something shifted in Italy. The warmth, the art, the distance from the gray disapproval of Copenhagen—it freed something in him. He wrote his first novel, The Improvisatore, a fictionalized autobiography that was published in 1835 to immediate acclaim.

That same year, something else appeared. Something smaller. Something that would matter more than any novel he ever wrote.

Fairy Tales for Children

In May 1835, a Copenhagen publisher named C. A. Reitzel released a slim, unbound booklet of sixty-one pages. It cost twenty-four shillings. Inside were four stories: "The Tinderbox," "Little Claus and Big Claus," "The Princess and the Pea," and "Little Ida's Flowers."

The first three were based on folktales Andersen had heard as a child. The fourth was his own invention, written for a girl named Ida Thiele, whose father had been one of Andersen's early supporters. Andersen was paid thirty rigsdalers for the manuscript—not much, even then.

The critics hated it.

They found the style too chatty, too informal. Children's literature in the early nineteenth century was supposed to educate, to moralize, to improve young minds. It was not supposed to amuse. The reviewers warned Andersen against continuing in this direction.

He continued anyway.

A second booklet appeared in December 1835 with "The Naughty Boy," "The Traveling Companion," and "Thumbelina"—the last inspired by old English tales of Tom Thumb and other miniature people. A third booklet followed in April 1837 with "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes."

That third booklet changed everything.

The Mermaid and the Emperor

"The Little Mermaid" drew on Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine, published in 1811, and on older legends about mermaids who fell in love with humans. But Andersen made the story his own—a tale of longing so intense that the mermaid trades her voice for legs, endures agony with every step, and ultimately dissolves into sea foam when she cannot win her prince's love.

The story established Andersen's international reputation. It resonated because it felt true—true to the experience of wanting something desperately, sacrificing everything for it, and still not getting it. True to what it feels like to be voiceless among people who will never understand you.

"The Emperor's New Clothes" worked differently. Based on a medieval Spanish story with Arab and Jewish origins, it told of swindlers who convince an emperor they're weaving him magnificent garments—garments that are invisible to anyone stupid or unfit for their position. The emperor parades naked through the streets while his subjects pretend to admire his finery.

On the eve of publication, Andersen revised the ending. In his original version, the emperor simply walked in procession and that was that. But he changed it so that a child in the crowd calls out the truth: "The Emperor is not wearing any clothes!"

That ending—the innocent honesty cutting through collective delusion—became one of the most referenced moments in Western literature. When we talk about "the emperor has no clothes," we're quoting Andersen, whether we know it or not.

The Stories That Stayed

Over his lifetime, Andersen wrote 156 fairy tales across nine volumes. They have been translated into more than 125 languages. Some of the most enduring include:

• "The Ugly Duckling" — A misfit bird, mocked and rejected, who transforms into a beautiful swan. Almost certainly autobiographical.
• "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" — A one-legged toy soldier who loves a paper ballerina and remains faithful to the end, even as he melts in a fire.
• "The Snow Queen" — An epic in seven parts about a girl named Gerda who journeys to rescue her friend Kai from a queen of ice. This one inspired Disney's Frozen, though the adaptation stripped away most of the original's complexity.
• "The Little Match Girl" — A freezing child strikes matches to stay warm, seeing visions of comfort and love with each flame. She dies in the cold. It is devastating.
• "The Red Shoes" — A vain girl puts on red shoes that force her to dance until she has her feet cut off. Victorian morality wrapped in horror.
• "The Nightingale" — A Chinese emperor prefers a jeweled mechanical bird to a real nightingale, until the mechanical bird breaks and only the real bird can save him from Death.

What makes these stories endure? They work on multiple levels. A child can follow the plot—the duckling becomes a swan, the mermaid wants to be human, the tin soldier loves the ballerina. But adults hear something else: the ache of not belonging, the cost of transformation, the faithfulness that persists even when it cannot be rewarded.

Fame and Its Discontents

By the 1840s, Andersen was celebrated throughout Europe. He traveled constantly, publishing travelogues that were as well-received as his fiction: A Poet's Bazaar, In Sweden, In Spain, A Visit to Portugal. He developed travel writing into something personal and philosophical, weaving fairy tales into his accounts of real places.

Denmark remained ambivalent about him. There was something about his social climbing, his neediness, his refusal to stay in his proper place as a shoemaker's son that irritated his countrymen. The critics who had dismissed his early fairy tales never fully embraced him.

But royalty did. The Danish royal family became his patrons. King Christian IX invited him to the palace. When the king's daughter Maria Feodorovna married Alexander III of Russia, Andersen's stories traveled with her to the Romanov court.

In June 1847, Andersen visited England for the first time. The trip was a social triumph. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her intellectual salons. At one party, he met Charles Dickens.

The two writers shook hands and walked to the veranda together. Andersen recorded the moment in his diary: "We were on the veranda, and I was so happy to see and speak to England's now-living writer whom I do love the most."

They had much in common. Both came from poverty. Both wrote about the lives of the poor and the marginalized. Both believed that fiction could illuminate social injustice. They respected each other's work deeply.

The Disastrous Visit

In 1857, Andersen visited England again, primarily to see Dickens. What was supposed to be a brief stay at Dickens's home at Gads Hill Place stretched into five weeks.

It did not go well.

Andersen was a difficult houseguest. He was emotionally needy, socially awkward, and apparently unable to read the increasingly desperate signals from Dickens's family that it was time to leave. When he was finally told to go, Dickens gradually cut off all correspondence.

Andersen never understood what went wrong. His letters went unanswered. He had enjoyed the visit immensely and was genuinely confused by the silence that followed.

Some scholars have suggested that Dickens modeled the physical appearance and mannerisms of Uriah Heep—the obsequious, unsettling villain of David Copperfield—on Andersen. If true, it's one of literature's more brutal acts of passive-aggressive revenge.

The Heart's Impossible Wants

Andersen's private life was marked by longing. He fell in love repeatedly, intensely, and almost always without reciprocation.

He was attracted to both men and women. To Edvard Collin, a man he loved deeply, he wrote: "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery."

Collin could not return the feeling. "I found myself unable to respond to this love," he wrote in his memoir, "and this caused the author much suffering."

Andersen was also infatuated with Karl Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. His diary from that period reads almost like one of his own fairy tales:

The Hereditary Grand Duke walked arm in arm with me across the courtyard of the castle to my room, kissed me lovingly, asked me always to love him though he was just an ordinary person, asked me to stay with him this winter... Fell asleep with the melancholy, happy feeling that I was the guest of this strange prince at his castle and loved by him... It is like a fairy tale.

Later in life, in his fifties, Andersen developed an intense attachment to a Danish ballet dancer named Harald Scharff. Some biographers believe this relationship was physically consummated; others vigorously dispute this. His diaries from the period are ambiguous, recording nervous evenings and visits that were "intimate and nice."

In March 1862, Andersen referred to this time as his "erotic period." By November 1863, he wrote simply: "Scharff has not visited me in eight days; with him it is over."

He took it calmly. They continued to move in the same social circles without bitterness. But Andersen attempted to rekindle the relationship many times, always without success.

And there was Riborg Voigt—the woman whose letter he carried in a pouch until death. She was the unrequited love of his youth, and he never stopped loving her, even decades after any possibility of being with her had passed.

In his diary, Andersen once wrote: "Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!"

The Stories as Autobiography

It is impossible to read Andersen's fairy tales without seeing his life in them.

"The Ugly Duckling" is so obviously about himself that it barely requires interpretation—the awkward creature who doesn't fit in, mocked and pecked at, who turns out to be something beautiful after all. Andersen was the ugly duckling. He believed it. He needed others to see it too.

"The Little Mermaid" speaks to anyone who has loved someone from a distance, who has sacrificed their voice to be near the beloved, who has walked on what feels like knives for someone who will never understand the cost.

"The Steadfast Tin Soldier" is about faithfulness that persists even unto death—love that doesn't waver even when it can never be fulfilled. The soldier and the ballerina end up melted together in the same fire. It's tragic and romantic and very, very Andersen.

Even "The Tallow Candle," one of his earliest works (discovered in a Danish archive in 2012), is about a candle that doesn't feel appreciated. He wrote it as a schoolboy. Already, at that age, he was writing about feeling unseen.

Legacy

Andersen died on August 4, 1875, at the age of seventy. By then, he had transformed the fairy tale from a form of folk entertainment into a literary art. Before Andersen, fairy tales were mostly anonymous, passed down orally, collected by scholars like the Brothers Grimm. After Andersen, they could be authored—personal expressions of individual vision.

His influence is everywhere. Disney's The Little Mermaid and Frozen are direct adaptations. But more subtly, any time a children's story dares to be sad, to end ambiguously, to trust young readers with complex emotions—that's Andersen's legacy.

His stories have inspired ballets, operas, plays, and dozens of films. A statue of the Little Mermaid sits in Copenhagen Harbor, one of Denmark's most visited landmarks. Every year on April 2, his birthday, the International Board on Books for Young People awards the Hans Christian Andersen Award—often called "the Nobel Prize of children's literature."

Perhaps most remarkably, his fairy tales have been translated into more than 125 languages. A shoemaker's son from Odense, who was told by his teachers not to write, who was mocked for his appearance and his ambition, who loved people who could not love him back—that man's words are now read in languages he never knew existed, to children who will never know his name but will carry his stories with them forever.

The Pouch

When Hans Christian Andersen died, they found that small leather pouch still hanging around his neck. Inside was the letter from Riborg Voigt, decades old, worn from being carried so close for so long.

He never stopped loving her. He never stopped loving any of them—the men, the women, the princes and dancers and unattainable objects of his impossible longing. That was his gift and his curse: he felt everything too much, and he couldn't stop himself from feeling it.

But he found a way to use it. He turned that longing into mermaids and tin soldiers, into ugly ducklings and little match girls shivering in the cold. He gave shape to the feeling that everyone knows but few can articulate—the ache of wanting something you can't have, of being someone no one quite sees.

That's why we still read him. Not because his stories are comforting. Many of them aren't. The little mermaid dies. The match girl freezes. The tin soldier melts.

We read him because he tells the truth about how it feels to be human—to want, to hope, to lose, and somehow to keep going anyway. A shoemaker's son taught us that. He carried the proof of it against his heart until the very end.