Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life

By Jens Andersen

"Andersen provides a fascinating backdrop for the life of the acclaimed fairy tale writer . . . a budding genius placed in the context of his time." —Publishers Weekly

 


Hans Christian Andersen was a storyteller for children of all ages, but he was more than that. He was a critical journalist with great enthusiasm for science, an existential thinker, an observant travel book writer, a passionate novelist, a deft paper cut-out artist, a neurotic hypochondriac, and a man with intense but frustrated sexual desires.


 


This startling and immensely readable, definitive biography by Danish scholar Jens Andersen is essential to a full understanding of the man whose writing has influenced the lives of readers young and old for centuries. Jens Andersen sheds brilliant new light on Hans Christian Andersen's writings and on the writer whose own life had many aspects of the fairytale. Like some of the memorable characters he created, Andersen grew up in miserable and impoverished circumstances. He later propagated myths about his life and family, but this new biography uncovers much about this man that has never been revealed before.


 


"[An] enthralling, ground-breaking new biography . . . Jens Andersen has a novelist's insights which enhance his meticulous biographical skills, making us appreciate (among much else) that ambiguity is as intrinsic to the life as to the art that came out of it." —The Independent

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 28, 2006
• ISBN: 9781468305470

Jens Andersen

Jens Andersen is an award-winning Danish author and literary critic whose works include acclaimed biographies of Hans Christian Andersen and Astrid Lindgren. He has a Ph.D. in Nordic Literature from Copenhagen University. Jens lives in Denmark and writes for several Danish newspapers.

Book preview

Chapter One

Arrival (1819–1822)

Please pay us a visit this evening, and you’ll have a chance to see a young genius!

These are the words of the invitation to Dr. Carl Otto sent by Fru Belfour on Norgesgade on an autumn day in 1819. The young doctor, who earlier in the year had defended his doctoral dissertation with bravura, promptly accepts the invitation, even though he is pressed for time. He’s in the midst of final preparations for a European cultural tour which, over the next couple of years, will bring him into contact with many of the great artists and natural scientists of the day: Goethe, Jean Paul, Humboldt, and, in particular, the surgeon Guillaume Dupuytren, whose operations in Paris are witnessed by hundreds of French medical students. They all wait for the ritualistic moment when the flamboyant doctor cuts something off the patient, which he then, with a carefully calculated gesture, flings up to the rows of benches where the cheering students throw themselves on the treasures dripping with blood.

In his own medical practice, Carl Otto seldom reaches for the scalpel. Like the ancient Greeks who studied the earth or the sky with the naked eye and the power of the mind, he dreams of mapping human nature by means of clinical studies. The young doctor swears by phrenology, and he is completely convinced that by using a craniometer—to measure and feel the distances between the frontal bone and the parietal bone, the back of the skull and the temple—he can determine the most important aspects of an individual’s psychological character. The young doctor is in the process of assembling a scientific collection of human skulls, and not many years will pass after his cultural tour before he has also started a journal for phrenology and published several books containing studies of craniums, some of which are those of criminals. These include the poisoner Peder Hansen Nissen, who killed his in-laws with rat poison; the five-time child murderer Ane Nielsdatter; and seven men who joined forces to set fire to an orphanage in Copenhagen. All of these heads are obtained by the doctor offering money under the table to the hangman out at Amager Commons after the executions.

Dr. Carl Otto belongs to the Romantic Zeitgeist—a collector with a sense for the freaks of nature. He is convinced that it’s not among the great masses of average Philistines but among the psychopaths, eccentrics, and those who are inclined toward Genius-Fever that he will find human destinies which diverge from the times and can tell him something fundamentally new about nature. For that reason he has taken a seat in the front row of Widow Belfour’s apartment on Norgesgade on this autumn day in 1819, so as to ad oculos measure the skull of the youth whom his hostess has enthusiastically labeled a pure young man, recently arrived in the city. He is hoping that this boy possesses the sort of genius nature that Henrich Steffens, the natural philosopher, has discussed: an individual who breaks through all rules thrown before him and who always blazes his own trail.

The doctor will not be disappointed. The ungainly boy is nearly six feet tall, lanky and loose-limbed, awkward in his movements. A type straight from the lowest strata of society, wrapped in a worn brown coat with sleeves that do not properly cover his long arms and fingers, which point down to a pair of enormous boots full of holes. He is wearing a gaudy cotton scarf, wound so tightly around his long neck that it looks as if his head with the blond hair is about to separate from his body. There is something apelike about the pale, gaunt face with the narrow, deep-set eyes. His cranium looks as if it could never have had the soft round shape of an infant’s head. Dr. Otto judges the circumference of the skull to be approximately twenty-five inches and the mass of his brain to weigh three pounds, more or less evenly distributed between the back of the head, where the bestial instincts reside, and the front of the head, where the centers of intelligence, morals, and an individual’s spiritual constitution are to be found.

The boy is remarkably spontaneous and openhearted. With the greatest innocence he declaims snippets from various comedies and poems, untroubled by the fact that he is being observed and studied. He sings, recites, and improvises wildly from the depths of his being. The Widow Belfour’s guests are compelled to follow along with the boy’s favorite dramatic scenes. When the guests are finally allowed to get up and go in to dinner, the boy stumbles over a door sill. And at the table he blithely stuffs sandwiches into his mouth and several times drops his knife and fork as he looks around in bewilderment, rattling off a steady, feverish stream of words.

Geniuses are mysterious hieroglyphs, writes Dr. Otto many years later in his memoirs,¹ thinking about the head he would have liked to include in his huge collection of Danish craniums from the 19th century, which he donated to the University of Copenhagen. On that autumn evening in 1819 it’s abundantly clear that the boy with the large, deeply etched physiognomy and the small, sunken eyes is not merely one of the many charlatans and conjurers of the day. He’s not the kind who, at the marketplace, can make a roasted sheep’s head bleat or snowballs burn, who can swallow bucketfuls of fire and ask riddles such as: While you look for me and use your head to find my whereabouts, I am something. But as soon as you find me, I am nothing. Who am I?

Y ES, WHO WAS HE, THIS STRANGE BOY? Where had he come from, and where was he going? That’s what one of Dr. Carl Otto’s good friends, the writer Just Mathias Thiele, asked himself one day as he sat in his lodgings on Gammel Strand and wrote out some of the folk legends and tales he had collected from the peasantry. Suddenly there was a loud knock on the door.

Come in! said Thiele, who was sitting with his back to the door and continued to write. Someone knocked even harder, and a moment later the door opened. In came, or practically fell, a tall, gaunt lad with a highly peculiar appearance. He stopped just inside the door and looked at Thiele, but then abruptly threw off his cap and flung out his arm. May I have the honor of expressing my feelings for the theater in a poem which I myself have written?

Before Thiele could manage to reply, his guest was in the midst of reciting a poem. He brought the last verse to an end with a sweeping bow, and without any sort of pause or transition, much less an introduction, he began performing a scene from Adam Oehlenschläger’s play Hagbarth and Signe, acting out all the roles himself. Thiele sat there utterly speechless, astonished and enchanted. The youth was oblivious to his surroundings, becoming more and more lost in the world of illusions. At a breathless tempo he came to the end of the scene. The improvised epilogue that rounded out the whole performance was concluded with a deep theatrical bow, whereupon he grabbed his cap from near the door and vanished down the stairs without another word.²

The folklorist never forgot that astonishing encounter with the importunate but naively endearing person who—like Thiele himself—was a messenger between the inexhaustible imagination to be found in the folk tales from the countryside and the salons of the big city, where people with a certain affectation had begun to cultivate the historical and natural roots of humanity.

It wasn’t until a couple of days after this unannounced visit that Thiele realized who the strange boy was. At a dinner given in town, other guests happened to mention similar unannounced visits made by a fourteen-year-old boy calling himself Hans Christian Andersen and claiming to be the son of a deceased shoemaker. He had recently left behind his poor mother in Odense, carrying a knapsack over his shoulder, which contained nothing more than dreams of performing at the Royal Theater and a child’s faith in both Our Lord and the tales in which the hero always triumphs in the end. To be an actor was the only thing in life that he desired, he said. If that failed, then ballet or singing would have to be his profession. At any rate, he was determined to go on stage.

The theater’s leading dancer of the day, Anne Margrethe Schall (also known as Madame Schall), the poet and critic Knud Lyne Rahbek, and Lord Frederik Conrad von Holstein—both of whom sat on the board of the Royal Theater—all received visits from the boy. His frail, sickly exterior quickly proved to be inversely proportional to his outspoken manner and the almost mulelike will that he exhibited whenever he planted his big boots full of holes on the doorsteps of the city’s better families and was granted an interview. The solo dancer turned him away, convinced that he was more of a lunatic than a genius. The theater directors also had little patience with him. Holstein didn’t think such a gaunt figure was suited to go on stage, to which the young Andersen boldly replied—as he tells it in his memoirs—that if His Lordship would hire him at a salary of 100 rigsdaler per year, he would undoubtedly make haste to grow fat!

Last but not least, the boy from Odense sought out the theater’s newly appointed choirmaster and conductor, Giuseppe Siboni, at his home on Vingårdsstræde. On that day Siboni happened to be hosting a large dinner party with prominent guests such as the poet Jens Baggesen and the composer C. E. F. Weyse. At five o’clock, just as the guests were sitting down at the table, the boy knocked on the front door and was immediately shepherded out to the kitchen, where he was offered something to eat. This also gave him the opportunity to confide in the choirmaster’s housekeeper, who was given the short version of his long, touching life story. Like most romantic stories, it was both edifying and, like the amber heart the boy wore on a string around his neck, full of faith, hope, and charity. It was his intention, the boy said, to be hired by the Royal Theater. That was actually the reason why he was now sitting in Choirmaster Siboni’s kitchen, wearing his brown confirmation jacket, which had been made from the coat of his late father. He also wore a pair of trousers with the legs tentatively tucked into the tops of his boots, though they kept creeping up; an enormous ruffle on his shirt; and a hat that looked as if it had been plucked from the street and was now constantly falling over the boy’s small eyes.

Hans Christian, as the boy was called, told his story of the humble, impoverished, but happy shoemaker’s home in Odense, where he had come into the world fourteen years before in a marriage bed that had been constructed from the remnants of a deceased counts catafalque. With a few coins in his pocket and a bundle of clothes over his shoulder he had recently left his hometown. The boy talked about his kind old paternal grandmother back in Odense who had stood at the city gates to wave farewell on the day he left. She had always said that the boy should try to become a clerk because that was rather distinguished. And at least he could win promotions and become something better than his wretched paternal grandfather. It’s true that his grandfather had once had his own farm out in the country, but he had lost his mind and now roamed the streets of Odense, wearing an emperor’s crown made of gold paper and trying to sell the strange little figurines he carved out of wood. The boy’s father, who had died several years ago, was a kind and clever man who thought his son should never be forced into anything, but should become whatever he liked. For his own part, the father had preferred to read books all day long and go to war for Napoleon rather than sit year after year cobbling together wooden clogs in the low-ceilinged room that served as bedroom, parlor, and workshop. The boy’s mother, who had now married another shoemaker, was of the opinion that Hans Christian should become a carpenter, tailor, or bookbinder, and thus had quite a different view of his upbringing. She had only allowed her son to leave home because one of the wise women, in whom she had great faith, had foretold at the boy’s confirmation that the capital of the island of Fyn would one day be lit up by a gigantic torchlight procession in honor of her Hans Christian.

It was quite a fairy tale the lanky boy had to tell. After the housekeeper had dried her eyes, she went to the dining room to clear the table, and she then whispered to Siboni what she had just heard. Soon everyone at the table had voted to take a closer look at this curiosity.

This was the age not only of absolute monarchy but also philanthropy. Among the well-educated and the intellectuals there was a sophisticated sense and an alert eye for what was extraordinary in individual people. The highest honor that could be given anyone during this period, which was both rationalistic and romantic, was to call the person in question a genius or an original.³

That was the main reason why the poor boy in Siboni’s kitchen—and at many other places in Copenhagen where he would suddenly appear during September 1819—was not promptly thrown out amidst a hail of curses and abuse. That was what he was accustomed to back home in the streets of his childhood town, where he was often subjected to the derision and scorn of his peers because he was different. There was one thing this boy had learned early on: if he gained admittance to the better bourgeois homes or to the palace, he would find a completely different understanding of and interest in a personality such as his. As the men at Siboni’s house said to each other while the dishes were cleared from the table, he might be a genuine savage.

A Son of Nature

Young Andersen must have done a remarkable job of promoting himself at Siboni’s house on that evening in September 1819. At any rate, the boy’s appearance in the parlor was of decisive importance for his fate and his career, which had been in imminent danger of ending before it even began. The last of his money was gone, and a return home to Odense with all the incumbent humiliations was fast approaching. It was all or nothing, so the improviser put his heart and soul into it when he was allowed to speak in the home of the choirmaster. His potpourri of songs, poems, and drama on that evening was presumably a mixture of highbrow culture and marketplace playacting. This was something that Andersen was fond of, both as a young man and later in life, and he often made use of it in his art. This was especially true whenever it was a matter of a stage performance, such as in Preamble to the Carnival, written for the popular Casino Theater in 1853:

Ladies and gentlemen, humble and great,

Here comes a man you have to know

My name resounds through Europe’s streets

My great-great-great-great grandfather

Was Doctor Philippus Aureolus

Theophrastus Bombastius Paracelsus …

I am of his lineage, but more a genius,

And without any boasting I say this.⁴

The fourteen-year-old Andersen probably didn’t present himself in such a self-confident or practiced manner, but the boy’s repertoire on that evening was a quaint blend of the high and the low: an aria from a ballad opera, which he had learned back home in Odense from a visiting Frøken Hammer; a couple of ample scenes from plays by Ludvig Holberg; as well as some home-brewed poems that no doubt sounded both provincial and pathetic. According to Andersen’s memoirs, he ended up bursting into tears, utterly overwhelmed by the goodwill that was suddenly showered upon him on that fateful day. But isn’t it also possible that the young improviser was overcome by his own art and emotions? At any rate, the manner in which he presented his texts personified the words of Herder, who says that song is a reflection of the savage himself:

All uncivilized peoples sing and take action; whatever they do, they sing, and they sing treatises … Nature has given them a single solace for the many words that oppress them, and a single substitute for the numerous so-called blessings that we enjoy: their love of freedom, their idleness, merriment, and song.⁵

Siboni’s guests that evening included, as mentioned, the poet Jens Baggesen. He was one of the stars of Danish literature in the period 1800–1820 who had lost the battle to become Denmark’s poet laureate to Adam Oehlenschläger. After the performance by the peculiar child of nature, the poet took the boy by the hand and asked him whether he wasn’t afraid of being laughed at or criticized. The lad, still sniffling, shook his head vigorously, and then Baggesen looked around at the other guests and said in a deliberate and solemn voice: I predict that he’s going to make something of himself one day! But don’t let it go to your head when the whole audience applauds you! And everyone nodded in agreement when Baggesen concluded that such a rare guest was reminiscent of the pure, true naturalness that is lost with age and in human discourse.⁶ Siboni promised at once to train the boy’s bright, clear voice, which was not without possibilities. And the rest of the evening a deep plate was passed around, enabling Weyse to collect 70–80 rigsdaler for the strange songbird, who had landed at one of the city’s fashionable parties in such an astonishing manner. The composer also took upon himself the responsibility of ensuring that the money would be paid out to the boy in allotments and that he would receive lessons in the German language and the educational basics. This, according to Choirmaster Siboni, was an essential prerequisite for succeeding at the king’s theater.

No doubt the cosmopolitan Giuseppe Siboni—who was also a political refugee—knew what he was talking about. As a former tenor singer he had performed in Vienna, London, and at La Scala in Milan. He kept his word and provided free singing lessons and tried to train the boy’s voice. The project had to be given up the following year when young Andersen’s voice began to change, but until then the boy found a sort of home twice a week when he came for leftovers at Siboni’s house. He ate the leftovers from the table of the choirmaster and conductor, and he was served meals up in the maids’ room after running various errands in the city for Siboni, his Italian cook, and the servant girls of the house. One day when Andersen was told to carry a platter to the dinner table, Siboni stood up and went out to the kitchen to inform his staff that Andersen was not a servant. That was a great day, and from then on the boy appeared more often in the parlor, growing closer to Siboni and his family, including the choirmaster’s niece, who was fond of drawing. She found an amusing model in the odd boy, especially when she dressed him in Siboni’s sky-blue tunic with a purple, gold-embroidered toga. The stout lord of the house had worn the costume in Mozart’s opera Titus when he performed for the first time in Copenhagen in January 1819. Now that Hans Christian had been admitted to the parlor, the boy also had an opportunity to listen to the choirmaster and to follow along with the music when the royal singers gathered for rehearsals, or Siboni directed various scenes from an opera.⁷ The free German lessons, which had been one of Siboni’s requirements, were arranged by Weyse through an agreement with a teacher named Bruun on Farvergade. He, like many others, was enchanted by the boy’s fantastic stories and so—as it turned out later—he even neglected to ask for payment for the lessons.

As he stood there in Siboni’s drawing room the young Hans Christian Andersen must have seemed like one of the wild-looking children that people during the Enlightenment loved to take in and cultivate as symbols of the Noble Savage. Outwardly filthy, ragged, and bestial; inwardly purer and nobler than so-called civilized people. It was almost as if all civilization had glanced right off this young lad with the talent for brilliant improvisation. He seemed utterly unaffected by—and ignorant of—everything having to do with breeding, morals, Christianity, and traditional conventions. In this son of nature there was apparently no inherited or innate refinement, but rather sheer, unadulterated sincerity. His hallmark was his primitiveness. As Jens Baggesen had been the first to point out, this presented a rare opportunity to test all the liberal, humane teachings of Rousseau and Fichte, which had very briefly found expression in Denmark’s Struensee era in the late 18th century. Back then they had also exposed the paltry view of humanity held by the absolute monarchy, as well as its numerous repressive measures.

In the 1770s Rousseau had interpreted the natural state of the wild child—both in terms of the individual adult and the entire time period—as something that had been lost. The boy from Fyn was quite simply a Danish variation of the 18th century Peter of Hannover, who was once found near Hannover, Germany, and then taken to the court of England’s George I. There the wild boy was kept as a sort of pet and jester figure, and he attracted a great deal of attention from the authors, philosophers, and scientists of the Enlightenment. An even more recent example was the wild boy of Aveyron—a boy of ten or eleven who in 1800 emerged from the woods in the south of France and was brought to Paris, where every conceivable natural scientist, doctor, pedagogue, and anthropologist in Napoleonic France attempted to study and then civilize the boy. The same was later done with the mysterious foundling Kaspar Hauser. Both cases aroused great attention in the Romantic era and revived the discussions from the Enlightenment about the relationship between humans and animals. The debate was particularly fueled by the explorers who returned home from expeditions to the far corners of the world with new, fascinating reports of orangutans (which were thought to be human), savages and barbarians, Hottentots, and children who had been raised by animals.⁸

This fourteen-year-old boy, at once inept and talented, with the romantic destiny, who now stood in the elegant bourgeois home, presented an extremely interesting and welcome challenge in the blasé, slightly indolent spiritual and social life of the capital. After decades of absolute monarchy, Denmark’s humiliating defeats in the war with England in 1807, and the national bankruptcy of 1813, Copenhagen had become a city in which people lived in a spiritual prison. As it says in the biography of another of the young artists of the day:

We harbored no doubts about the wisdom of the government, but held our hats in hand and our backs bowed to its officials. We quietly accepted what was inevitable or what was in any case impossible to avoid, and submitted to a patient, contented torpor, under which nothing ever happened and little was accomplished.⁹

The artists and scientists had all the more reason, sentiment, desire, and will to see possibilities in a boy with a natural though raw and unpolished talent. Here was something for observation and discussion in the absolute monarchy’s Copenhagen, something that interested the rationalists, republicans, and Romantics, including the professor and poet Frederik Høegh-Guldberg. He was the brother of one of the boy’s greatest benefactors back home in Odense, Lieutenant Colonel Christian Høegh-Guldberg, and at one time he took up his own collection in Copenhagen on behalf of Andersen. On that occasion the boy had again aroused attention when he insisted on going around to thank in person all his benefactors, most often giving them a spirited little improvisation, exactly as he had done for Just Mathias Thiele. If he was clever enough to squeeze his big foot in the door, he was also smart enough to show his gratitude, in keeping with one of the popular tunes of the day: My son, if you want to get ahead in the world, then bow!

All these strategic forays swiftly brought Andersen out to Bakkehus, the meeting place and cultural hub of the intellectual circles. Everyone associated with the Danish Golden Age of art and science frequently gathered there with the owners of the house, the artist couple Kamma and Knud Lyne Rahbek. At the time, Bakkehus stood outside Copenhagen’s ramparts, a refreshingly long walk away from the city center, out in God’s free nature near Valby Hill, where everyone, regardless of social class or ancestry, could enjoy the same sunshine and the same fresh air. On his way to this paradise, Hans Christian had to walk through Vesterbro, past all the comedy theaters, menageries, shooting galleries, and carnival booths with strongmen and giant women, live seal pups in tubs, calves with two heads, and lambs with five legs. Farther out, he passed the house where Oehlen-schläger was born, the restaurants on Pile Allé, and Frederiksberg Castle, where half of Copenhagen would gather on Sundays to listen to music outside the palace and watch the royal family sail along the canals with King Frederik VI, dressed in his admiral’s uniform, at the tiller.¹⁰

Not far from there, out in the open and with a view of the city, stood Bakkehus, where everyone was in many ways refreshingly free from the omnipresent repression of ideas and deeds under the absolute monarchy. And out there it was easy to entertain the heretical thought that nature certainly could—yes, perhaps even ought to—replace the law books and the Bible. In their home the Rahbeks had created an indoor and outdoor salon culture, in which the Zeitgeist was more or less always being debated. Out there Rationalism and Romanticism were not incompatible opposites. And for the majority of the writers, painters, philosophers, politicians, and scientists who came to Bakkehus, emotion ranked equally with reason. Spirit resided in nature, as it was expressed by one of the regular guests, the physicist H. C. Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism in 1820. Beauty and truth were to be found in the mountains, the sea, the woods, as well as in lightning and thunder, magnetism, and the human body and soul. This was something known and acknowledged by most of the luminaries who convened out there at Bakkehus. Participants included Adam Oehlenschläger; Ørsted and his brother, the jurist Anders Sandøe Ørsted; the writer Johan Ludvig Heiberg; and the composer C. E. F Weyse. From the civil servant class came the ever-diligent and respected businessman and philanthropist Jonas Collin with all his well-mannered children: Ingeborg, Gottlieb, Edvard, Louise, and Theodor, who were so cultivated that Kamma Rahbek instantly dubbed them The Thousand Thank-yous.¹¹

It was among this cultured company, which in many ways was a microcosm of the Danish Golden Age, that the young Hans Christian Andersen now made his entrance. He was a real provincial Clumsy Hans who—as it says in one of his mothers letters from the 1820s—lands on his head right in the middle of the big world.¹² He was exactly like some of the fairy-tale characters in his later works and in his colorful paper-cuts, who also tumble around in the modern world after having been released from underground. The goal was to create a new life for himself, and a new identity. The basis for this was to be the irresistible fairy tale of his romantic childhood, which all the distinguished Copenhagen citizens swallowed whole. They did so primarily because the extraordinary story of the boy’s life fit hand in glove with the prevailing ideas and educational ideals of the milieu to which the determined boy sought admittance. The perception of being a Son of Nature and an Aladdin, as the favorite of the ages was called in Oehlenschläger’s play, was one of the era’s great illusions, and Andersen gladly played along with this perception. As he later wrote in his memoirs: I must have been a remarkable child of nature, quite a unique revelation, not to mention a ‘presence.’¹³ With an astonishingly clear insight into the Zeitgeist and a well-developed sense for who should be influenced, where, when, and how, the fourteen-year-old boy from Fyn threw himself into the greatest and most important endeavor of his life: to establish contacts with the leading citizens of Copenhagen and learn how to create and make a name for himself in their art and culture.

According to Andersen himself, his very first foray was directed at the solo dancer Anna Margrethe Schall, who lived on Bredgade. He brought her a recommendation from the book printer and newspaper publisher Herr Iversen, who may have been an important man in Odense but was largely unknown in Copenhagen. At any rate, he was unknown to the solo dancer, who had never heard of the publisher of the newspaper Fyens Stifts Avis. In The Fairy Tale of My Life and in other, shorter memoirs, Andersen describes the astounding scene when he went to visit the solo dancer and immediately pulled off his boots so he could sing and dance the tender part of the female lead in Isouard’s popular ballad opera Cendrillon. A contemporary critic described the opera as a noble and ingratiating expression of naïveté, childish innocence, deep emotion, chivalrous spirit, and beautiful, outlandish reverie.¹⁴ The play, which recounts the story of Cinderella, had taken Copenhagen by storm in the 1812–13 season. The following summer it became a nationwide triumph, with performances in other cities, including Odense. That was where the young Hans Christian witnessed all the songs and dances of the opera, because he had finagled himself a part as an extra, dressed as a page in red silk trousers.

This stood him in good stead in Madame Schalls parlor in 1819, where every single scene, line, dance step, and tap on the tambourine—and here the boy had to use his hat—was performed inside and out, with sweeping, expressive gestures and emotion. Little leaps and loud slaps on his hat emphasized the painful subtext—also for Andersen—of the key words: What do riches mean, / what is splendor and magnificence?¹⁵ That was not something Madame Schall could tell him, and she was equally uncomprehending and alarmed when confronted with this strange person and his terribly primitive interpretation of a classic ballerina role, with which the dancer was quite familiar. Surely the boy was mad. She quickly ushered him out with a few words about speaking to director Bournonville on his behalf. With tears in his eyes, the boy thanked her, offering to run errands in town for her in the future if she would help him.¹⁶

The Courage to Have Talent

It takes courage to have talent, wrote the young Danish critic Georg Brandes in a brilliant essay about Hans Christian Andersen published six years before the death in 1875 of the world-famous author of fairy tales.¹⁷ Brandes was the highly gifted man of letters who was quite familiar with the international literary scene and would soon become the standard-bearer for Naturalism and The Modern Breakthrough. In his articles he dared to reproach the world-famous author of fairy tales by saying that there was no other writer in the entire kingdom who had damaged Danish literary criticism as much as he had, primarily because he had always had the courage to have talent. Right from the start.

When a poor, fatherless, and introverted boy of fourteen—a pup so tall that you could break him in half and make two pups out of him, as it says in Andersen’s last novel from 1870¹⁸—conceives the idea that he’s going to be famous and, trusting in the abilities that Our Lord has given him, then sets out in the world to realize his dream, his life will be shaped as a series of tests. Achieving fame is seldom a smooth process, especially for someone who is destitute. No matter how brilliant his talents, he has to have an unfailing faith in his calling and abilities. Without certain physical and psychological strengths, his talent will be crushed under the struggles of life. Andersen himself has told the story many times, for instance in the novel Only a Fiddler from 1837. In his portrait of Christian the musician, we have quite a precise description of an individual who never manages to realize his brilliant potential because he lacks the will and the courage to have talent—not to mention benefactors. Andersen described his own departure from Odense in early September 1819, which became increasingly shrouded in legend over the years, in his first autobiography from 1832. This book, which was not intended for publication, was first discovered fifty years after the author’s death and published in Denmark.

I then decided, like the heroes in all the tales I had read, to set off, all alone, out into the world. I was quite calm because I trusted blindly in Our Lord, who would undoubtedly look out for me. After all, things always went well in the comedies and stories.¹⁹

Hans Christian was confirmed in April 1819, and by then he had reached a point in his life where he had to do what was right for himself, even if it might be dangerous and require courage. So in early September of that year, he left Odense with a few possessions, a travel pass, and a letter of recommendation from Herr Iversen the book printer. After the voyage across the Great Belt in the pitching sloop and the subsequent long coach ride from Korsør to Copenhagen, Hans Christian quickly encountered everything that was cause for alarm in a big city, although there were also a few comforting signs. For example, the Royal Theater opened its season on September 6—the same day on which the boy arrived. He was deposited outside the city gates, and then found lodgings at an inn on Vestergade.

From the ramparts surrounding Copenhagen, it was possible to see all the way to the Swedish coast to the east, while to the north there was a view of Svanemølle Bay, Charlottenlund, and—in good weather—the copper dome of Bernstorff Castle. Farther out to the north was the rolling countryside with farms and small towns, Bispebjerg Mill on Frederikssund highway, and the estate Bellahøj. People with exceptional eyesight claimed that to the west they could also catch a glimpse of the slender spire of Roskilde Cathedral.

In contrast to its picturesque surroundings—the sea, the green ramparts, lakes, fields, and forests—the interior of Copenhagen was not an attractive sight in 1819. It’s true that in certain ways Copenhagen was a small, securely sleepy city of approximately 100,000 inhabitants. On the other hand, there were four times as many rats and thousands of other larger animals. Horses and cows lived in such great numbers within the city gates that in some buildings it was necessary to construct stables on the second floor, which meant that the animals had to be hoisted up and down. Fierce, thin dogs could be seen roaming everywhere. People and animals were crowded together in wretchedly paved streets with no sewers, where the deep gutters were always filled with rainwater, food scraps, and excrement, which at regular intervals would pour into the cellar living quarters whenever there was a heavy rain. This meant that countless numbers of epidemic diseases flourished in Copenhagen around 1820. Contemporary descriptions of the city mention gastric and typhoid fever, measles, roseola, influenza, catarrh, diarrhea, and dysentery. Yet the doctor was rarely called in; for the most part he belonged to the upper classes. If one of the doctors for the poor was summoned, he had to be prepared to crawl on his knees to tend to the sick, who lay packed together in dark garret rooms.

In other words, if a person did not spend his daily life behind the elegant facades of the palaces, estates, and bourgeois abodes surrounding Kongens Nytorv, the Danish capital was an unspeakably filthy and unhealthy place. All those human beings crowded into such a small space, less than ten square meters per person, meant that Copenhagen was always teeming with people and animals, who were all penned in for a large part of the time. Between nine at night and seven in the morning, no one was allowed to pass through the city gates and ramparts, which marked the border between city and countryside. In the narrow dark streets lined with shops, the view was limited to the walls of the buildings and street corners. Signs hung from the facades with symbols for all sorts of professions: scissors for tailors, boots for shoemakers, keys for locksmiths, horseshoes for smiths, and basins for barbers.²⁰

Also prevalent among the urban populace were the more bestial instincts. Morals were as lax as might be expected in a capital with so many unemployed and idle individuals, including soldiers, servant girls, apprentices, drunks, whores, and pickpockets of both sexes and all ages. Drunkenness, fornication, fraud, gambling, theft, and the fencing of stolen goods were all the order of the day. Prostitution was on the rise in the early 19th century, as was divorce, and illegitimate births made up more than one-fourth of all births in Copenhagen. Casual relationships between the sexes had, in other words, become an ingrained part of social life, in both the lowest and the highest classes.

When Andersen arrived in Copenhagen on September 6, 1819, it was as a stowaway, which did not mean that he had cheated, but that he had paid the lowest fare of three rigsdaler. And for that reason he was set down outside Vesterport. He then took his time walking to the top of Frederiksberg Hill, where he could see and count all the towers in the king’s city. Some of them had been standing for years, while others had been rebuilt after the heavy bombardment by the British in 1807, when shells and firebombs had rained down upon the city. The national bankruptcy in 1813, after the humiliating wars with England and the subsequent economic crisis, had left its mark on the city and the country. A sharp line between rich and poor had been drawn in Denmark—a line that the paternal King FrederikVI was intent on maintaining. Young Andersen had once seen the absolute monarch in Odense when the king was passing through. That was in June 1818. The shoemaker’s son had climbed up on the church wall and, awestruck, had peered at the mighty man. But he was disappointed because the king wore neither gold nor silver but was dressed in a simple blue cape and a red velvet collar, making him look more like a soldier. It was only as an old man that Andersen first spoke of this encounter with the king, after which he had said to his mother: Oh, but he’s just a human being! The pious and loyal woman had promptly hushed the lad, who was starting to take too much after his liberal-minded and outspoken father. She said, Have you lost your mind, boy!²¹

The Royal Theater in Copenhagen served as both a symbolic and tangible stage in the whole illusion about what life was like for Danes under God and the rule of the kings in their native country, and governed by the lords, who, in spite of the abolition of serfdom in 1788, still wielded great influence and power in the countryside. Night after night during the long, boring winter, plays were performed at the theater for the upper classes. The king sat in his customary, elevated seat in the theater, and just below him sat the nobility, ministers, and government officials, as well as writers such as Adam Oehlenschläger, B. S. Ingemann, and—in time—Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Henrik Hertz, and Hans Christian Andersen, who could all make the people forget about the economic recession and enjoy themselves for a few hours. The Royal Theater was the only public theater, and there were performances nine months of the year, up to six times a week. The theater could seat 1,300 to 1,400 people. In addition, the drama school students, including at one time the dance pupil Hans Christian Andersen, gave a number of Sunday matinees during the year at the Court Theater in Christiansborg Castle. Several private theaters also existed, as well as traveling troupes, whose actors were often amateurs. It was truly the age of the theater! Everyone performed comedies, and that’s what everyone wanted to see. As a historian expressed it in the 1890s as he attempted to describe the theater mania around 1820:

Quite a good interplay exists between the stiltedness that characterizes the whole public tone of the day and the passion not only to see but to act in comedies. The naïve and the artificial entered into an inseparable union and determined the tastes of the time.²²

The world of the theater did not open for Andersen quite as easily as he may have imagined it would after his first successful performance at the home of Choirmaster Siboni in September 1819. The boy’s perception of his own artistic potential and limitations had no basis in reality. At any rate, there was an enormous gulf between the cozy parlors in Odense belonging to Widow Bunkeflod and Lieutenant Colonel Høegh-Guldberg, who had always praised and encouraged the boy, and the drama school at the king’s own theater, where the law of the jungle reigned every hour of the day. Back home in Odense, Hans Christian’s mother had actually known what she was talking about when she once told him that the theater path was no bed of roses but rather a laborious process. You risked starving to death to be light on your feet, and you were given oil to drink to make your limbs supple.²³

At the theater’s drama school the shoemaker’s son was no longer the gifted only child but merely one more talented young person among many others with greater talent. And, for the most part, they were much more expressive and genuine on stage than he was. Young Andersen, with his naive faith in the good Lord and his own boundless abilities, had not taken this into account. He discusses this in his novel Only a Fiddler, in which the talented young violinist Christian tries his luck in Copenhagen. He too has become enamored of the theatrical world. At his first encounter with this mecca on Kongens Nytorv, it’s said that he might well have gone over to the ticket office and stuck his head all the way inside the window, in the belief that the ticket window was the very framework and space in which he would see the comedy.²⁴ In spite of everything, the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Andersen did not have quite such a primitive concept of what the theater was like. But he had no idea at all what was required to become a dancer or singer at the Royal Theater. Time after time he made himself ridiculous on stage during 1820–21. He was also humiliated, mocked, and tormented by teachers and students alike at the theater. With expert eyes they universally appraised him as a creature who lacked all mastery of his movements, and it quickly became clear that he could be used only close to the wings, where it was a matter of keeping his mouth shut and concentrating on carrying torches, weapons, and flower bouquets without dropping them or stumbling in his costume.

Back in Odense the boy had always playacted. In fact, daily life was a theater for such a sensitive and imaginative boy, who needed only a piece of cloth and a stick to transform himself into a knight battling dragons. Down by the river he would improvise his little nature dramas with numerous roles, all of which he played himself. When he visited the pastor’s kindly widow, Fru Bunkeflod, who lived right across from Shoemaker Andersen on Munkemøllestræde, he heard not only about the art of poetry and read many classic dramas, but he also learned to sew costumes for his puppets. Andersen grew up in the spotlight of the lively, real theater. Odense had a theater of its own, and during the summer months many traveling theater companies came to town. They always found a large and appreciative audience in Denmark’s second-largest city, even though the quality of the performances varied, ranging from the professional summer tours of the Royal Theater to amateur troupes from both Denmark and abroad, offering dilettante productions, dance, juggling, and acrobatics.

During his childhood Andersen had many opportunities to take a look at the work of the more or less professional actors who came to Odense, performing plays by Holberg, Wessel, and Kotzebue. Occasionally he would go to a play with a local actor, also a clerk at the prefect’s office, who had taken an interest in the peculiar lad with his fondness for the theater. Or Hans Christian might sneak into the wings and beg for a job as an extra, which meant not only that he would be admitted free but that he would also be rewarded with a place up on stage. In all his memoirs, Andersen describes his most celebrated childhood role in the aforementioned Cendrillon when, dressed as a page in red silk trousers, he had ample opportunity to study all the dance steps that he later performed in such an original fashion in his stocking feet at the home of Madame Schall, the solo dancer in Copenhagen. On another occasion a visiting acting troupe advertised for extras. The children were supposed to present themselves in long white shirts with black borders, and the six- or seven-year-old Andersen performed for two evenings in this costume. After the play, when several ladies out on the street laughed at the boys attire, Hans Christians mother, both offended and proud, replied: He’s an actor in a comedy at the real theater!²⁵

Another way to gain free admittance to the various theaters in Odense was to become a placard carrier. That was why, early on, the boy allied himself with the town’s placard carrier, Peter Junker. Even if this didn’t give him a ticket to a seat in the promised land, he could still sit at home in a warm corner with the placard. And with the help of the plays’ exotic titles and the actors’ melodious names, he could conjure up a drama, the likes of which the world had never seen. This was my first unconscious attempt at writing, Andersen says in The Fairy Tale of My Life, in which he also talks about whole plays that he would memorize or piece together in the course of a day. In terms of his own productions, Hans Christian was not only the author, director, and set designer, but also the tailor, dresser, and press officer. In the back of his father’s military account book for 1812–13, the seven-year-old budding dramatist lists the titles of no less than twenty-five plays that he has either written or—for the most part—intends to write. In his memoirs Andersen mentions his tragedy Abor and Elvire, in which all the characters of the play die, one after the other, because that’s what always happened in the plays he had seen and read! The intrigue for this play was taken from an old ballad about Pyramus and Thisbe in a school textbook:

"Elvire awaited her Abor, but when he did not come, she hung her necklace on a hedge to show that she had been there and went for a short walk. Abor arrived, thought that Elvire had been killed by a wild animal, and killed himself. Then Elvire appeared and was supposed to die of grief, but since the whole play didn’t yet fill more than half a page, I made a hermit come in to tell her that his son had seen her in the forest and had fallen in love with her. To touch Elvire’s heart, and because I didn’t know any better, I made him speak exclusively in scriptural passages taken from Balk’s Catechism. Then the son appeared and killed himself because of love. Elvire followed suit, and the old man exclaimed: ‘Death do I apprehend / in all my limbs!’ whereupon he too succumbed. I was particularly fond of this work and read it to anyone who would listen."²⁶

One of the people to whom young Andersen read his play was the neighbor woman on Munkemøllestræde. She sarcastically suggested that he call it Perch and Cod [the Danish word for perch is aborre]. When he indignantly told his mother about the neighbors remark, she told Hans Christian not to mind—the woman was merely jealous because her own son would never be able to write such a play. Otherwise the neighbors offered both help and inspiration. Another play, which the shoemaker’s boy never completed, was supposed to include numerous royal personages, but unfortunately he was not at all sure how he should present the more refined speaking style that royalty would use. Hans Christian then sought the advice of his neighbors, who felt that kings and queens would undoubtedly speak in many foreign languages. The pragmatic young dramatist instantly acquired an old lexicon containing scores of German, English, and French phrases, and all of a sudden he was able to speak on behalf of royalty. Stylistic concerns, also relating to grammar and punctuation, had no effect on the boy’s imagination, so the play opens with the princess offering a nonsensical morning greeting to her father. The splendid line, with its childish appetite for the whole world, is so unmistakably typical of Andersen, and it anticipates the cosmopolitan—and at times Babel-like—embrace of the globe embodied by his later life and work:

"Guten Morgen, mon père! Have you had good sleeping?"²⁷

Dance Pupil

Many of Andersen’s childhood dreams and illusions were shattered during his first years in Copenhagen as he, Apollo-like, tested his forces and sought transfiguration in the art of the theater. Yet there were some bright moments in the gathering darkness. In 1821 the stubborn young man seized upon hope when Crown Princess Caroline herself heard rumors about the odd, talented boy and expressed her desire to see and hear him at Frederiksberg Castle. It was an unforgettable day. Hans Christian Andersen sang and declaimed so it was sheer delight, and afterwards he was rewarded with fruit and cakes, as well as a paper twist filled with candy and ten shiny rigsdaler. He promptly dropped the paper twist, and the candy rolled across the floor at the feet of the princess. Utterly unperturbed, as if he were out on the street, the boy threw himself onto his hands and knees and scooped up the sweets, which merely amused the Crown Princess all the more. Happy and bearing his rewards, Andersen then strolled home through Frederiksberg Gardens, where he sat down under one of the budding beech trees. He sampled his treats and then impulsively threw his arms around a tree, kissed the bark, and spoke to the branches, the birds, and the flowers, proceeding to sing joyfully at the top of his lungs. At that moment I was a child of nature, the adult Andersen recounts in his memoirs. Others didn’t take quite as positive a view of the happy Pan. Are you out of your mind? shouted a stable boy to Andersen, who slunk homeward in embarrassed silence.²⁸

In a physical sense he often suffered great need during the period 1820–21. There were times when he didn’t have proper food, but he was familiar with deprivation from his childhood, and he managed to get by, though he was often on the verge of starvation. There was nothing new about being tormented, impoverished, or hungry, or in living right next door to criminals and prostitutes. During the first turbulent days after his arrival in 1819, when Hans Christian had spent all his money and was trying to gain an audience with those in power at the Royal Theater, he also sought out a certain Madame Hermansen. They had been fellow travelers in the mail coach to Copenhagen, and she not only offered the shoemaker’s boy from Odense food and lodging, she helped him figure out how he could most quickly earn some money. At that time he had not yet encountered any goodwill among the theater people, and so he had few choices. Either he would have to find a skipper to take him back to Fyn or he would have to become an apprentice to a Copenhagen craftsman. The boy chose the latter on September 17, 1819, when Madame Hermansen showed him a little announcement in the newspaper Adresseavisen: Sturdy fellow of honest parents who wishes to learn the cabinetmaking profession should report to Borgergade 104, second floor.

In his memoirs, the adult Andersen recounts that he arrived, bashful as a maiden, at the cabinetmaker’s workshop at six the next morning. But his sensitive skin soon collided with a harsh and filthy wall of Copenhagen journeymen with an endless repertoire of raw and vulgar jokes. The new apprentice was a tasty morsel for the taunts of the apprentices and journeymen. What a shrimp and sissy he was; he couldn’t even manage to pull the big saw! This was all too reminiscent of what he had experienced back home at the clothing factory in Odense when a workman heard him singing in his clear, delicate voice and suddenly said: That’s no boy, it’s a little maiden! Whereupon all the others had lifted Hans Christian up onto a table and pulled down his pants.

I screamed and wailed, the other workmen found the vulgar joke amusing, they held me by the arms and legs. I shrieked, wild with fear, and shy as a girl I dashed out of the building and home to my mother, who promised me at once that I would never have to go back there again.²⁹

But in 1820–21 in Copenhagen, there was no mother for Hans Christian to run home to, nor was he suited to be a cabinetmaker, and so he was forced to depend on charity and live in wretched conditions in one of Copenhagen’s red-light districts. Andersen found lodgings with a Madame Thorgesen, who owned a four-story building at the narrow, infamous end of Ulkegade (later named Holmensgade and today known as Bremerholm). His room was a pantry with no window and barely enough space for a bed. Whenever he wasn’t at the theater or the drama school he would sit in this pantry with books from J. C. Lange’s Lending Library and daydream his way into much larger worlds. Or he would reconstruct his childhood puppet theater and sew puppet costumes from scraps of silk and velvet he had begged as fabric samples from the elegant shops on Østergade. Like many of the other women in the building, Madame Thorgesen lived a mysterious night life. Men of all ages came and went—some more refined and incognito than others—as the sixteen-year-old boy looked on, apparently uncomprehending. Judging by the memoirs of the adult Andersen, he had no awareness of the shady, unsavory side of love as it was being practiced right outside the door of his pantry.

I lived in happy dreams, paying almost no attention to the demoralizing surroundings that daily intersected with my life … only now, as a grown-up, do I realize what an abyss it was, in the true sense of the word, where I played and dreamed.³⁰

Madame Thorgesen was a stern, no-nonsense widow who, in contrast to all the refined acquaintances the poor boy had made, refused to be charmed by the boy’s touching life story when he had no money for the exorbitant rent. From the beginning she stood firm with her demand for 20 rigsdaler a month for room and board. Andersen had been forced to give as good as he got and use his magic to get the rent lowered. He fixed a penetrating stare on the picture of Madame Thorgesen’s deceased husband, which hung in her parlor, and prayed to the dead man in the painting, who actually looked quite kind and gentle, asking him to persuade his wife: I even rubbed some of my tears on the eyes of the painting so he could feel how bitterly I was crying.³¹

Andersen lived for a year and a half in that pantry on the second floor of Madame Thorgesen’s house, but in September 1821 her finances became so tenuous that she advised the boy to seek food and lodging up on the third floor with Madame Henckel, who was the wife of a coxswain. Uncertainty soon spread to all areas of the boys life in the capital. Choirmaster Siboni had long since ended his agreement with young Andersen when the boy’s voice suddenly began to change. Nothing was working out for him at the ballet school or at the Court Theater, either, where Andersen had wormed his way in as a dance pupil during the 1820–21 season. Yet all the toil was worth it for the theater-obsessed lad, because as a dance pupil he had free admittance every third evening to the female dance pupils’ gossip-box on the fourth floor of the theater on Kongens Nytorv. There he would sit in peculiar company and often hear peculiar things, but my soul was pure and my thoughts lived and breathed nothing but the theater.³² The ballet and acting pupil was proud of his free access, and no less of his tights in his musician’s role for the ballet Nina, which was one of Madame Schall’s most celebrated parts. Andersen was allowed to perform in this ballet, primarily due to his height, on January 11, 1821. It was his debut, and by early afternoon he was already in costume. Pleased as punch, and wearing long red stockings and thin-soled ballet slippers, he pranced across Kongens Nytorv to the home of the royal watchmaker Jürgensen on Østergade. The boy was accustomed to visiting Jürgensen’s mother now and then, so she could see and admire the pupil in his musician’s outfit.³³

Even back then Andersen was a great poseur. Many years later—in a conversation with one of his young traveling companions—he described another, special evening at the theater during his time as an aspiring dancer. The king was in his box that night, and Andersen, wearing his lovely new tights, slowly worked his way forward during one act, all the way to the front of the stage, so that His Majesty up in the royal box would be able to have a good look at him. The king peered down with astonishment at the odd boy, who was not in the least embarrassed or bashful under the king’s scrutiny. This was primarily because the boy himself was preoccupied with studying Adam Oehlenschläger; he had suddenly caught sight of the great writer in the orchestra seats and had fallen in love with him.³⁴

The ballet training was hard on Andersen. The usual pedagogical practice was to let the youngest pupils learn from the older ones ahead of them. It demanded great concentration and discipline from the pupils, both of which were in short supply at the Royal Ballet around 1820. Threats of being confined to their quarters or expelled outright constantly hung over the heads of those