CHAPTER 9

Britain, Dickens, Revolutions and Wars

1

On Wednesday 23 June 1847 Andersen wrote in his diary:

‘At 7 o'clock I was on deck and saw England's east coast. – Our ship was sailing slowly; we didn't arrive in London until 5 o'clock. – The Thames bears witness to the fact that England rules the ocean. From here its servants sally forth, whole hosts of ships. Every minute a courier (steamer) arrives; the others have decked out their stovepipe hats: that one over there had a long smoke-crepe with a red fire-flower peeking out. – The long white wake trails behind them. – The coast, probably fifteen to twenty miles wide. The ships come running under full sail, pluming themselves like swans. Thousands of fishing-boats, like a teeming marketplace, like a brood of chicks, like confetti. Steamer after steamer, like rockets in a great fireworks display. – At Gravesend it looked like a big marsh fire, and it was the smoke from the steamers! – The pleasure yachts of rich, young gentlemen. A splendid thunderstorm, lightning struck several times to the north, and a railway train raced along with its blue smoke against the black clouds – these things appealed to me more than the massive, sooty buildings on the other side of the Thames. “They know you're here and bid you welcome!” an Englishman said to me. Indeed, I thought, the Lord knows – he's the one making it thunder.’1

Surely no travel writer is Andersen's superior in presenting the salient, culturally telling features of a place, especially as it first strikes the visitor. Or in the ability to convey their immediate sensory impressions on an individual, the emotional or imaginative chords they sound. What could be more vivid to the inner eye as well as the outer than the three similes found here for the increase of fishing boats as Andersen moves up the estuary, for all of which we can find counterparts in his fiction? Nor is he afraid to admit to the feelings of most travellers arriving somewhere new, that conditions have somehow been stage-managed for their own personal benefit (the God-given thunder). One is very aware from this opening diary-entry onwards – much material would, suitably adapted, be incorporated into My Fairy-Tale Life – of Andersen's consciousness that he is now visiting a superpower, a country of immeasurable world-consequence attributable both to geography and to a complex social structure, inherited from its long past and arcane to the outsider. Andersen would esteem London as a greater city (and not just in area or number of inhabitants) than Paris or even than Rome, for all its unsurpassable grandeur and his personal associations with it. If Rome, he will pronounce, is the city of night providing rich dreams of the long-gone past, London represents bright busy daytime, a comparison he was to reiterate, even recycle, a fair number of times.2

A visit to Britain was all but overdue by the time Andersen made it. William Jerdan,³ influential editor of the Literary Gazette and ardent promoter of Andersen's work, had warmly proposed it back in November 1846. He had ever-growing admirers there.

In February 1845 Richard Bentley, London published Mary Howitt's translation of The Improvisatore, subtitled Life in Italy and including a thirty-seven-page essay on Andersen by the translator herself based on Xavier Marmier's ‘biography’. In August that year the same publisher and translator brought out Andersen's other two novels – Only a Fiddler, followed by O.T. – in a three-volume edition, with the complementary subtitle Life in Denmark. It was designated as ‘by the author of The Improvisatore; or Life in Italy’, but presumably many readers could easily supply the author's name for themselves. Andersen is in good measure responsible for the bad press Mary Howitt (1799–1888)⁴ has suffered in accounts of him and his works in Britain. No doubt their relationship, professional, social and personal, suffered severe, ultimately irreparable strains. Certainly she was imperious, regarding him (initially anyway) as her own rightful property and nobody else's. But by citing in full the disagreeable, retaliatory, ad hominem remarks Mary Howitt made about him (‘but an average sample of a numerous and giant race’ [the Danes])⁵ Andersen craftily ensured that any European reader would take his side against her. (Nobody, he could be certain, would think him an ‘average sample’ of any ‘race’!) Now, however, as we follow Andersen upriver to his destination, we can let all still lie before us, and try to see Mary Howitt more objectively.

Born into a Quaker family, like her husband and many-times collaborator, William (1792–1879), Mary Howitt was an indefatigably productive writer, of novels, poems (verses for children mostly: ‘“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly’, memorably parodied by Lewis Carroll, was hers), of well-informed apologias for Scandinavian literature and a fine, truthful and posthumously published (1889) Autobiography (edited by her daughter). The titles of some of her novels, suitable for a young readership, indicate their serious, sober, puritan interests: for example Hope On, Hope Ever (1840) and The Two Apprentices (1844) which bring to life real, working communities of provincial England like the weavers of Dentdale on the Yorkshire/Lancashire border. A stay in Heidelberg in 1840 awoke Mary Howitt to interest in Scandinavian culture, and she taught herself Swedish and Danish, proceeding to render into English works by the proto-feminist novelist Fredrika Bremer whose admiration for Andersen, and particularly for Only a Fiddler, we encountered in Chapter 6. She brought Bremer the fame she deserved in England. Not at all averse to pushing herself (and her husband) forward in the literary/social world (Dickens, Mrs Gaskell and Tennyson were among the friends Mary Howitt cultivated) and with contracts never far from her mind, she has too often been subjected to doubts and disparagement. Did she always translate from a Scandinavian language as she definitely led publishers and readers to suppose, or did she rely (even chiefly?) on German versions of texts? Well, possibly! And she certainly made mistakes. But she commands (for the most part) a flexible English prose style, that of someone familiar with the art of fiction-making, of holding her readers' attention. Besides, it is through her unstinting efforts that Andersen's work first became known in Britain, and because of them that these Danish productions won the admiration, affection and, more, the creative emulation of Charles Dickens himself.

In February 1846 Mary Howitt brought out her own selection of Andersen's fairy tales, Wonderful Stories for Children (ten in all), her publisher this time Chapman and Hall, with, unfortunately, the author's surname given as ‘Anderson’! But 1846 was altogether an annus mirabilis for Andersen in the English publishing world.6 Also in February there appeared, from Joseph Cundalls, London, a collection of his stories translated by Charles Boner. May saw versions of Andersen's fairy-tales by Caroline Peachey, issued under the title Danish Fairy Legends and Tales (William Pickering, London), and June a further selection by Charles Boner (same publisher as his February volume). In October Richard Bentley, who after all had begun the whole trend and whom Andersen would greatly take to, brought out a translation of A Poet's Bazaar by Charles Beckwith Lohmeyer, and in December Chapman and Hall produced a third collection of Charles Boner's translations of Andersen. The month (May) before Andersen's actual arrival in England, Picture-Book Without Pictures came out in an English translation from the German, and during the actual course of his stay Mary Howitt's version of The True Story of My Life appeared (this time, of course, legitimately from the German, since, as we have seen, that was the language in which it had been issued). Andersen could thus arrive in England as one eagerly awaited by many, his enthusiastic admirers led by Dickens and Thackeray, the latter declaring himself ‘wild’ about him.

Of all the above book people, Richard Bentley – to be, in due course, the very first publisher of certain Andersen works, editions in English preceding those in the original Danish – became the one with whom Andersen enjoyed the warmest relationship.7 He liked Bentley's handsome house in Sevenoaks, liked his family – and they him – and later was both moved by, and grateful for, Bentley's sincerely worded feelings for the Danes in their dark war-time.

‘#x201C;You must surely be able to see whomever you wish!”’ – “It wouldn't do; people all over England would take exception. … This is the land of freedom, where you die from etiquette.”’⁸ This conversation Andersen reports in his Diary as offering an alarming window on to English society, but his autobiography My Fairy-Tale Life likewise stresses its ubiquitous cliquishness, though a good deal of his information (and, for that matter, his empirical experience of it) he owed to the Danish ambassador to the Court of St James's, Count Reventlow (whose family would appear in the new novel he had already begun by the time of his arrival). Reventlow was a strenuous escort,⁹ quite determined that his country's greatest international literary celebrity should see the best people, and the best people only: Lord and Lady Palmerston, the Duchess of Suffolk, already ‘delighted with The Improvisatore, the first book about Italy!’ and the Duchess of Sutherland, ‘who is supposed to be the richest lady in England’. There were so many possible pitfalls, Andersen knew, awaiting an innocent such as him. Lady Blessington was well known as a novelist even in Denmark, and was clearly overjoyed at the opportunity to entertain the author of A Poet's Bazaar, extolled in her own last publication as ‘a literary treasure such as is not to be found in many books taken together’. But Lady Blessington, alas, was not accepted by key sections of the beau monde on account of her scandalous love-life. ‘Her!’ scornfully ‘lisped’ a young lady to whom Andersen was rash enough to mention visiting her house, with its beautiful balcony where a Tasmanian blackbird warbled specially for him. Again – ‘Dickens had written in Punch, and therefore you couldn't talk with him.’ It was emphatically borne in on Andersen – and emphatically he repeats it to his readers – that in England the aristocracy and those eminent figures they were prepared to admit into their ranks did not consort with artists. But in Andersen's case they were prepared to make an exception, and more, go out of their way to invite and welcome him. Well-born ladies vied with each other to praise ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Top and the Ball’ to his face – just as the king and queen of his own country had done. Andersen vindicated their collective, possibly convention-defying decision by being captivatingly charming wherever he went. ‘Many presented me their cards, and most of them offered me invitations. “This evening,” said Count Reventlow, “you have made a leap into high society in which people need years to be accepted! But don't be too modest. You must put on a bold front if you want to advance!”. …’ Here then Andersen was, that individual to whom (as he had apotheosised fictionally only the year before) Edvard Collin refused to use ‘Du’, being feted by glittering socialites in the world's richest (and possibly most snobbish) country.

Outside all the receptions and ‘at homes’ Andersen noted again and again the general politeness of the English; when you asked directions from them, for instance. Policemen set a wonderful example here. You only had to go up to one in the street and ‘he will go with you and show you the way’. People in shops were memorably kind and helpful.10 As if to redress his comments about its enslavement to etiquette, Andersen declares in his autobiography: ‘Here one is in a nation, which at the present is perhaps the only religious nation on earth; there is a respect for morals and good manners. It is no use dwelling upon occasional excrescences and excesses that are always to be found in a great city.’¹¹

This last clause is another instance of Andersen's disingenuousness, this time about the workings of his own mind. Even if he did not morbidly ‘dwell’ on them, Andersen was made morally uncomfortable by many disagreeable features of London life and duly noted them; ‘the windows had so much soot on them that my sleeves were blackened. The sun is shining on the bed to show there is a sun here.’¹² He observed the coal dust even on the public statues. As for commercialism, ‘here you must demand an exaggerated price for everything’, and ‘religion’, however admirable, was also responsible for the oppressive Victorian sabbatarianism which led him to write: ‘Sundays are terribly boring in London’.¹³

Even at his most euphoric he could not deny his distress at London's poor, and, though tempted, did not try hard to play it down. The passage in his autobiography where he expresses this is one of the most powerful in the entire book: he discontinues his effusive (and now decidedly wearying) apostrophes to English Society and offers instead an indictment of the culture which has produced not only large-scale wretchedness but also large-scale refusal to accept responsibility for it, or even pay it the attention any foreigner could see it demanded.

I have seen ‘high life’ and ‘poverty’; these are the two opposite poles of my memory. ‘Poverty’ I saw personified in the form of a pale, hungry girl in miserable, ragged clothes hiding in a corner in an omnibus. I saw ‘wretchedness’ and yet it never uttered a word in all its misery, for that was not allowed. I remember those beggars, both men and women, carrying on their breasts a large, stiff piece of paper on which were written the words: ‘I am dying of hunger! Have pity on me!’ They dare not speak, for they are not allowed to beg, and so they glide past like shadows. They stop in front of people and stare at them with an expression of hunger and melancholy on their pale, thin faces. They stand outside the cafes and restaurants, choose one of the people sitting there and stare fixedly with such eyes – oh such eyes as only misery can show. A woman points to her sick child and to the words which are written across her breast: ‘I have not eaten for two days.’14

It is scarcely surprising that Andersen should be so moved and so appalled by such sights.

Two years earlier he had been a guest of Duke Christian August of Augustenborg, whom he had met through the royal couple, at Gråsten Castle, from 12 to 21 November 1845. He had been saddened by the temper of the political talk there, not least because of the prevailing attitude to Schleswig-Holstein encouraged by the Duke's friend (and later political-military associate) Prince Frederik of Nør. So Andersen turned to a picture recently sent him by the painter, Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818–48) and was inspired by its subject to write one of his best-known stories, ‘Den lille Pige med Svolvstikkerne’ (‘The Little Girl with the Matches’, usually known in English simply as ‘The Little Match-Girl’); it was published the following month (December 1845) in Dansk Folkekalender for 1846.¹⁵ And it is surely in pictorial terms, like a swift magic-lantern sequence, that this heart-wringing work lives on in the mind. Andersen scarcely needs to give us any detail extraneous to his visual images. Yet what details he does provide add hugely to its devastating effect. It is hard, here as on other occasions, to know Andersen's state of mind as, surrounded by ducal splendour, he wrote feelingly of extreme poverty. (Likewise episodes of The Two Baronesses dealing with crippling rural misery were written at the luxurious manor of Glorup.) All one can say is that write them he did, and that he rated ‘The Little Match-Girl’ high among his creations.

The setting is New Year's Eve in a city, a time of forward thinking and festivities for most citizens – and therefore too of conspicuous waste, since such occasions are celebrated with luxury goodies – and also, of course, this being Northern Europe, a time of bitter cold. The little girl at the picture's centre stands totally outside all the happy plans and gatherings, yet is the victim of the economic prodigality behind them just as she is of the winter cold. With such lavish expenditure on family meals and table decorations (of all of which she is aware), what can be left with which to relieve the discomforts of those outside the doors? And how, lacking even essentials of clothing and food, can she and her kind survive snow and cutting winds? The slum home she has emerged from has, Andersen informs us, walls these winds whistle through despite the cracks having been stuffed with straw and rags. If she goes back there without having sold a single match, her father will beat her, though he must know – as she herself does – that the odd skilling from a sale will scarcely solve their economic ills.

We first see the little girl walking along a frozen city street barefoot, in fairy-tale terms a favourite posture of brave venturesome innocence; think of Gerda on her winter journey to find Kay. But in literal terms the condition is only too probable; shoe-leather, as Andersen the cobbler's son knew, was expensive. When she left home, the match-seller did indeed have slippers on, her mother's and therefore much too big for her, and inevitably one came off as she dashed across the road to avoid being run over by two carriages. The other slipper was snatched from her by one of the many pert, waggish street-boys who populate Andersen's oeuvre and who derive from his juvenile persecutors back in Odense. This specimen – a relation too of the cobbler's apprentice in ‘The Tinder Box’ – jokes that he can use the girl's slipper as a cradle when he comes to have children of his own. Including this item of crude humour so early on in the text means that we take this street along which the match-girl makes her difficult way as a real one. We cannot dismiss the central character's misfortunes as merely fictional and remote from ourselves. Its reality makes it seem a more ineluctable place from which to make the ascent from the harsh sufferings produced by Mammon into the kindly sphere of God's love.

This ascent constitutes the body of the story, and each of its four – or is it five? – stages can be seen in both physical terms – consequent on bodily actions of somebody so beside herself with cold and fatigue she scarcely knows what she is doing – and spiritual ones. Andersen leaves it open as to whether the girl's successive visions are hallucinations brought on by her overwhelming hunger. But every vision except the last derives from the tangible world from which the match-seller has been, through fate and not through any shortcoming of her own, banished. In truth, many of our most treasured spiritual/emotional experiences are inextricable from secure material circumstances. A warm stove in which a fire cheerfully burns; a table set for an ample family feast; a Christmas tree ablaze with candles – these, domestic, cosy, assuring, are the very stuff of our childhood experience of joy. And these are what the girl sees as she strikes the matches she knows there's no point in selling. We should make a correction here; these items are the very stuff of other children's experience of joy. They are all way beyond this child's reach. Each vision fades out; the stove vanishes to leave one burnt-out match behind, the feast parodies itself like the end of some nightmare, the roast goose leaping up from the platter with a knife and fork stuck in its back, and the Christmas candles rising in the sky until they turn into a constellation of stars, a single one of which tumbles downwards.

‘“Nu døer der Een!”’16 ‘“Now someone is dying there!”’ thinks the little girl, for her grandmother, who, when alive, was her only true friend, used to tell her that when a star falls towards earth a soul is simultaneously rising up to God. Andersen confessed that when beginning his story his own ‘Mormoer’, mother's mother, was much in his thoughts.17 For all her shady past and the Odense Tugthus, he had been fond of her and still treasured her fund of stories. One had been about Anne Marie, his own mother who, as a young girl, had been forced to go out on the streets begging.

This little beggar-girl, obviously, doesn't realise that she herself is dying. Eagerly she strikes a fourth match against the wall, and on seeing her grandmother, begs her not to disappear like the stove, the goose on the platter, and the candlelit Christmas tree. In her anxiousness that this old woman, ‘saa klar, saa skinnende, saa mild og velsignet’,¹⁸ ‘so clear, so shining, so gentle and blessed’, will stay, she strikes all the matches she still has. They reward her by casting a radiance round her envisioned grandmother, who takes her in her arms and bears her – to where else but Heaven? This sight, and indeed this destination are perfectly consonant with what we now know can occur in the human mind at the moment of death. But we hesitate to describe it as a fifth mental stage of the heroine's journey because life has now departed from her; in earthly terms she no longer exists. But her glimpse of Heaven is truly part of the belief-system which has sustained her when alive and thus redeemed her last moments.

The people who, early next morning, find the little girl dead with the bunch of spent matches beside her think she expired while trying to warm herself against the freezing night. ‘Ingen vidste, hvad Smukt hun havde seet, i hvilken Glands hun med gamle Mormoer var gaaet ind til Nytaars Glæde!’¹⁹ ‘Nobody knew what beauty she had seen, in what radiance she had gone with her old grandmother into the joy of the New Year!’ The gloomiest manifestation of urban poverty can be but the screen behind which spiritual joy awaits; appreciation of the universal capacity to attain this means never writing off any individual, however remote from us. Think about the following:

Jo is in a sleep or a stupor today, and Allan Woodcourt, newly arrived, stands by him, looking down upon his wasted form. After a while, he softly seats himself upon the bedside with his face towards him. … The cart had very nearly given up, but labours on a little more.

‘… It's turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?’

‘It is coming fast, Jo.’

Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end.

‘Jo, my poor fellow!’

‘I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a gropin – a gropin – let me catch hold of your hand.’

‘Jo, can you hear what I say?’

‘I'll say anythink as you say, sir, fur I knows it's good.’

‘OUR FATHER.’

‘Our Father! – yes, that's wery good, sir.’

‘WHICH ART IN HEAVEN.’

‘Art in Heaven – is the light a-comin, sir?’

‘It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME!’

‘Hallowed be – thy –’

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!20

These are the last moments of Jo, a crossing-sweeper – a juvenile underclass Andersen was intrigued by in London 1847 – in the slum quarter, Tom-All-Alone's as famously rendered by Dickens in Bleak House (1852–53). Dickens was outraged by social abuses and cruelties above all because they offended against the whole vision of humanity, and its great, if elastic capacity for fellow feeling, which he imaginatively entertained and tried to express – and to encourage. Andersen, while far less involved in practical politics than Dickens, was also possessed of such a vision, apparent from The Improvisatore all the way to the very last tales. Furthermore he shared with Dickens manic depressive spirits – probably each soon recognised this in the other – so that the heights and depths of the society they lived and worked in corresponded with, and appealed to, the highs and lows in themselves. And in both cases only humour and, at times, a fierce willed sentimentality could enable them to achieve the equilibrium essential to ambitious creativity.

Andersen first met Dickens in the home of none other than that Lady Blessington whom so many more proper members of Society chose to shun. (Wasn't she, Andersen had heard, having an affair with her own son-in-law, Count d'Orsay, ‘the most elegant gentleman in London’?) Not that fashion and elegance were exactly absent from the dinner of hers Andersen attended at which guests, including the Duke of Wellington's son, were served by waiters with silk stockings and powdered hair (‘as in other grand houses’). Andersen was signing copies of Mary Howitt's translation of The True Story of My Life, with suitable personal inscriptions, when Charles Dickens made his entrance: ‘young and handsome, [he] had a kind, intelligent face with a mass of beautiful hair, that fell on both sides. We shook hands, looked deep into each other's eyes, spoke to each other and understood each other. We went out on to the veranda, and I was so moved and delighted to see and speak to the living English writer whom I love more than any other that tears came into my eyes. Dickens realised my love and admiration. Among my fairy tales he mentioned “The Little Mermaid” which Lady Duff Gordon had translated for “Bentley's Magazine”; he also knew The [A Poet's] Bazaar and The Improvisatore.’²¹ This last fact is of particular interest to the present study, for Dickens, I feel sure, remembered Andersen's first novel (and possibly Andersen himself, his whole compelling persona, ingenuous, transparent-seeming on the one hand yet mysterious, unfathomable) when he came to write his most purely personal and perennially popular book David Copperfield (published 1849–50).

Dickens – who on 1 August, because unable to visit Andersen, left for him ‘all of his works beautifully bound and inscribed inside: “To H.C.A. from his friend and admirer C.D.”’; ‘I was ecstatic!’22 – was fittingly to be the last person Andersen saw in England. But breaking into his English stay was a carefully planned and much looked forward to trip to Scotland.

Walter Scott was present in Andersen's mind throughout his Scottish visit, and the novel now taking shape in his head and to come out in English (September 1848) before it did in Danish, The Two Baronesses (De to Baronesser) is permeated by Scott, to the extent of containing a fully acknowledged adaptation of the central episode of The Heart of Midlothian. ‘I was full of the thought that I was in Scotland, the land of Walter Scott,’ wrote Andersen in his first Scottish diary entry.²³ And re-appreciation of what Scott had achieved must have made him view Dickens anew, for who but ‘Boz’, ‘the author of Pickwick’, ‘the Inimitable’, was the true successor – in Britain, Europe (including Russia) and America – of ‘the author of Waverley’, ‘the Wizard of the North’? Much of what Andersen had in common with and had part-learned from Scott applied to Dickens too: a profound reverence for Shakespeare; a high regard for Fielding with his imposition of the picaresque on to deep-rooted situations; a restless curiosity about the different, indeed diverse component groups of their societies and the traditions and world-pictures upholding them; a sense of how the past, with its flaws as well as virtues, went to make the present; a lively interest in lore of all kinds and an ability to harness the forms of fairy tale with their bottomless psychic address to more domestic or workaday situations. And all three men were driven by an awareness of the childhood self deep within, born of sufferings in early years never fully overcome, when they felt they were apart from other children (Scott through his lameness, Andersen and Dickens through the often squalid ups and downs of their families entailing hopelessly erratic schooling for exceptionally talented sons). And all three possessed the steeliest will to excel, to surpass their erstwhile superiors.

The drama of Edinburgh, its fusion of a speaking past with geographical features of impressive singularity, struck Andersen from the first, from when he was brought there by the railway that so amazingly cuts right into the middle of the city through that ‘immense trench’ (Andersen's phrase) containing Princes Street. He saw on the one side the New Town created by the Adam brothers (perhaps too regular and geometric for his tastes), and on the other, scaling the left-hand hillside, the Old Town ‘so picturesque and magnificent, so old, so murky, so distinctive…,’ its medieval tenement buildings rising up ‘nine and eleven storeys’.24 Views of Edinburgh from various elevations Andersen likened to the magnificent prospects of Constantinople and Stockholm he had already honoured in prose.

Where the town slopes down towards the sea there is the hill called Arthur's Seat, famous from Walter Scott's novel, The Heart of Midlothian. The whole of the old town is like a mighty commentary on these great works. And the Walter Scott monument is situated so beautifully in a spot in the new part of the town where there is a panorama of old Edinburgh. It is in the shape of a mighty Gothic tower, under which is a statue of the poet seated in a chair. His dog Maida lies at his feet, and in the topmost arches of the tower there are figures from his works, figures who are now known the world over, Meg Merrilies, the Last Minstrel and so forth.²⁵

Andersen was so intimately familiar with these creations of Scott's that he tracked their movements down in Edinburgh, though he was far from unmindful of the frequent filth and squalor of their present-day context, and he would take such characters with him when he went on a tour of the city – to Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine, to Sterling and the Highland Line, and to both sides of the Firth of Forth. He was keen to see, but frustrated by not being able to do so, Ravenswood Castle, the ancestral home of Edgar its Master, and where Lucy Ashton went mad for love of him, in The Bride of Lammermoor, the opening chapters of which are reworked in those of The Two Baronesses.²⁶ In this new novel a male character, who has personally seen it, will even give the heroine a welcome description, down to the dog Maida, of the Scott Memorial itself (actually inaugurated 1846, only a year before Andersen's visit).

Andersen was back in London by 26 August. On 30 August he left for Ramsgate to take the Ostend steamer next day. But on arrival at the Royal Oak, his hotel there, he found a note from Dickens saying that he and his family would expect him for dinner (at five o' clock) in their house at nearby Broadstairs. The quality of this occasion and its sequel next day Andersen celebrated in his autobiography:

[He] and his wife gave me a hearty welcome. It was so splendid to be with them that for a long time I did not notice what a beautiful view there was from the dining-room where we were sitting. The windows faced the Channel, and the open sea rolled in just below. The tide went out while we were eating, and the water receded extremely quickly. The great sandbank there, on which lie the bones of many a sailor, could be seen in all its splendour, and the light-house was lit. We talked of Denmark and Danish literature, and about Germany and its language, which Dickens wanted to learn. An Italian organ-grinder happened to come and play outside while we were eating. Dickens spoke in Italian to the man, whose face beamed with delight at hearing his native language.

After dinner the children came in. ‘The house is full of them!’ said Dickens. There were no fewer than five of them; the sixth was not at home. All the children kissed me, and the smallest of them kissed his own outstretched hand and then gave it to me. … We parted late in the evening, and Dickens promised that he would write to me in Denmark.

But we were to meet once more before I left. Dickens surprised me by going to Ramsgate the following morning, and was standing on the jetty when I arrived to go on board. ‘I had to come and say a final farewell to you!’ he said and went on board with me, and there he stayed until the ship's bell gave the signal for departure. We shook each other's hand, and with his sincere, wise eyes he looked at me in such a friendly way, and as the ship sailed, he was standing as far out as he could go, by the lighthouse. He waved his hat. Dickens was the last one to send me a greeting from the coast of my dear England.27

One very significant result of these occasions of friendship (testifying, for all their amiable warmth, to a histrionic quality in both men) was Andersen's first break with his previous publishing precedent. In December 1847, following the agreement made with him, Richard Bentley issued a collection of new fairy stories in English (versions by Charles Beckwith Lohmeyer) before its appearance in Danish called, appropriately enough, A Christmas Greeting to my English Friends. There was, it must be said, commercial as well as sentimental reasons for this; Andersen would be paid for both volumes rather than having the translated one ride free on the back of the original. In fact two out of the seven tales had already appeared in Denmark: ‘The Shadow’ and ‘Den gamle Gadelygte’ (‘The Old Street Lamp’).²⁸ But the other five were fresh from the writer, as announced. Andersen explained his conviction that England should get his latest book before anywhere else, in his heartfelt but decidedly gushing preface (addressed, as one might have expected, especially as Bentley was the publisher, to the first of his English-language readers, Charles Dickens):

Whilst occupied with a greater work [one assumes the novel, The Two Baronesses] there sprung forth – as the flowers spring forth in the forest – seven new short stories. I feel a desire, a longing to transplant in England the first produce of my poetic garden as a Christmas greeting: and I send it to you, my dear, my noble Charles Dickens, who, by your works had been previously dear to me, and since our meeting have taken root for ever in my heart.

Your hand was the last that pressed mine on England's coast: it was you who from her shores wafted me the last farewell. It is therefore natural that I should send to you from Denmark, my first greeting again, as sincerely as an affectionate heart can convey it.29

Of these stories one, ‘Historien om en Moder’ (‘The Story of a Mother’)³⁰ Andersen would later declare pleased him, ‘Barnet i Graven’ (‘The Child in the Grave’, 1859),³¹ with its similar theme excepted, more than any other of his productions. ‘It came to me without any apparent reason while I was walking down the street.’ With its uncompromisingly dominant theme of infant mortality – so prevalent, indeed virtually inescapable, in every social class at this time; both the Dickenses and Edvard and Jette Collin suffered its almost unmanageable pain – this tale struck a raw contemporary nerve, and its imagery is correspondingly bold and universal, deriving as it does (like ‘The Little Match-Girl’) from popular notions of what lies beyond human death. A mother pursues Death who has taken away her child, on a bitterly cold winter's day, after an illness agonising to witness. On her journey to catch up with him she sacrifices her eyes to a speaking lake and her (still youthful) dark hair to an old woman guarding Death's strange greenhouse. This last, a contrast to the freezing forest and the cavern-studded mountain that is Death's residence, is full of exotic plants which she is unable to see until Death returns and – in order to prove a grim point about his very being – gives her back her eyes. All the many plants there throb with the heartbeats of real people, but in some growths the hearts of the newly dead pulsate, and naturally the mother recognises those of her own late child. In her desperation she grabs hold of two flowers, but Death asks her with her restored eyes to stare down into a well and view the futures of a young life that these plants contain, the one happy, the other wretched. One of them must obviously be the future of her child were he restored to life, but Death refuses to tell her which. Rather than let him face (the fifty-fifty possibility of) a lifetime of anguish, the woman relinquishes the flowers and consents to Death taking her child into a yet more distant realm. She herself goes back to our world, allowing that all that happens there is ultimately for the best, because we have such limited knowledge of existence.

For all the intensity of the rendering of the mother's grief and the tactile vividness of the forested wasteland through which she ventures, ‘The Story of a Mother’ traffics in major theological problems it has not scope enough to tackle adequately, let alone answer. In the first version the story ended happily, with the woman waking up and finding her child better, and normal life awaiting her. Obviously the second ending is an improvement artistically – after the mother's purgatorial experiences, how could the humdrum have had any kind of solidity? And from the standpoint of truth too, for children do die however much we love them; there is no value in making a story suggesting otherwise. Even so, the final verdict on accepting sad events as part of God's scheme which must ipso facto be good can't but read tritely.

It was ‘Det gamle Huus’ (‘The Old House’)32 that Dickens liked best of the stories of A Christmas Greeting; he admired it enormously and wrote to Andersen: ‘I read that story over and over again, with the most unspeakable delight.’³³ Certainly its art is strikingly close to Dickens's own, while also very much its author's. For us it also seems interestingly prescient of the changes now under way all over Western societies. It is at once valedictory of a past with mores that can and will never be revived and prognostic of an ampler, perhaps kindlier future.

2

‘The little boy, the old man, and the Tin Soldier are especially my favourites,’³⁴ said Dickens, and ‘The Old House’ can be thought of as a fugue on these three characters, with the last named in a different key from the other two. The theme itself is nothing less than Imagination (including the art of narrative) as our only weapon against Time, even if, as with the Tin Soldier himself, we can allow it to turn destructively against us. Significantly the story is named not after any member of the trio but after what subsumes them, illustrating in its history even more forcefully Time's inexorability. It stands opposite the small boy's home, it is where the old man spends his last years, and it retains the Tin Soldier, even after its demolition. As in ‘The Shadow’ the house beckons alluringly to the individual with whom we identify (the boy) and surely proves to be the dwelling-place of ‘Poesie’.

It was built almost three hundred years earlier, according to the date on its central beam, (mid-sixteenth century), and is now the only old house in the street. ‘I had never before seen,’ Andersen wrote of York, ‘such picturesque houses as these with their carved beams in their gable-ends and bay windows.’³⁵ In the story he emphasises the house's jutting upper storey and abundant wood carvings, and so brings to mind buildings like those we still can see in York's famous Shambles. The nineteenth century's belief in itself, leading to replacement of the old by the modern, is a given here, the fine house despised as an anomaly by its neighbours, whom Andersen wittily and characteristically makes articulate: ‘“hvor længe skal det Skrummel staae til Spektakel her i Gaden”’,36 ‘“how long will that monstrosity remain as a blemish here in the street”’. (That the age also, whether in the Gothic Revival or later on, in Art Nouveau, also sought to reproduce and even outdo Middle Ages decorativeness perhaps provides an ironic subtext to the tale.)

Fittingly, this solitary house is home to a solitary and very old man. Apart from an aged factotum coming in to assist him every morning, he is alone all day. And just as the house announces its antiquity by its replete appearance, so the old man involuntarily advertises his years: leather knee-breeches, brass-buttoned coat, indisputably eighteenth-century-style wig – sartorial appurtenances long since discarded, rejected.

The small boy opposite is fascinated by the house which provides him with images of the past, of soldiers, and creatures of once-popular fantasy like dragons. No less is he interested in its single inhabitant, nodding to him through his window, to be nodded back to: ‘og saa vare de Bekjendtere og saa vare de Venner’,³⁷ ‘and thus they were acquaintances and thus they were friends’. Yet they don't exchange a word. Communication exists on so many levels, and culture from the Industrial Revolution forward has unduly exalted speech and writing over other, yet more instinctual forms. But when the boy hears his parents say: ‘“den gamle Mand derovre har det meget godt, men han er saa skrækkelig ene!”’³⁸ ‘“that old man across the way is very well off, but he is terribly lonely!”’ he knows he must make more real his bond of friendship with him: he will relieve his loneliness by giving him one of his two tin soldiers. So across the road he goes and presents the soldier, wrapped up in paper, to the man's factotum, explaining why it is he is making this gift.

Here Andersen was drawing on personal experience, charmingly related in Notes for My Fairy Tales and Stories (1862), and showing his rapport with children, his understanding of their mindsets. He had been staying with the German writer (poet, verse-dramatist, novelist, apologist for German-Jewish culture and friend of Tieck and Wagner), Julius Mosen (1803–67) in Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, Mosen having become dramaturg at its Court Theatre.³⁹ His small son gave Andersen on his departure one of his tin soldiers, precisely so that he would not be lonely. In the story the soldier does not belong to a toy army – as he did in ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ (of which this new tale is in part a remake). He is one of a pair, and when taken away from the boy's home to the old house, he feels desolate, missing his mate acutely. More resonantly even than in the earlier story, we sense the autocracy of the young over their loved possessions because they have endowed them with so much of themselves, and their concomitant disregard of them as free-standing individuals. This situation extends well beyond that of child and toys, as an analogue of graver and central social relations: landlords and tenants, masters/mistresses and servants, employer and employees, humans and animals, patrons and artists.

The boy's kindness to the old man is much appreciated, and his esemplastic mind (to use Coleridge's term), so notable in the pre-pubic young, is exercised on the interior of the house into which he is now invited. It is in a lamentable state – rickety balcony, creaking chairs and cupboards, floors full of holes, courtyard walls and flowerpots choking with excess vegetation – yet to him exuding romantic grandeur. He hears the wooden trumpeters carved on the doors blowing him a fanfare, the suits of armour clinking as if worn by real warriors, the silken dresses of the women in the pictures on the wall rustling, and he relishes the objects the old man produces for him – a picture book, playing cards more gilded than present-day ones, a piano which sounds hoarse when his host plays on it. The old man also shows him a portrait of a beautiful but cheerful-looking woman who, the boy thinks, looks at him with ‘sine milde Øine’,40 ‘her gentle eyes’. Who is she? In an anti-romantic masterstroke Andersen reveals that this picture is no souvenir of the past but something the old man bought in the junk shop down the way because he once knew the subject, dead for half a century. Whether there was ever an emotional connection between the two is unclear, unimportant; the connection exists now, for this junk-shop purchase, by appealing to memory and imagination, keeps the old man's evaporated past alive, and lightens up his present, enough to make his loneliness bearable.

Memory does not at all alleviate the misery of the Tin Soldier, rather it intensifies it, making it impossible for him to forget the liveliness of the small boy's home in contrast with the torpor of the Old House. During the boy's two visits to the Old House the Tin Soldier leaves him in no doubt about his sufferings, and the tears of tin he has shed, and impassionedly evokes the life from which he has been forcibly (as he sees it) removed – particularly the doings of his former owner's siblings, like his little sister, Maria, not yet two years old.

Here again – according to the writer's Notes⁴¹ – Andersen drew on the family of a friend, of the composer J.P.E. Hartmann (1805–1900): ‘It was the composer Hartmann's little daughter Maria who as a two-year-old always had to dance whenever she heard music. Once she entered the room while her older sisters and brothers were singing a hymn. She started to dance, and her musicality was such that it did not permit her to change the rhythm, so she danced by standing first on one leg and then on the other as long as the measure of the hymn demanded.’ (There is, as we shall see, a tragic sequel to this episode.)

This anecdote finds its way into the pining complaint to the boy of the Tin Soldier who then continues: ‘“… Siig mig, om I synge endnu om Søndagen? Siig mig Lidt om den lille Maria! og hvordan har min Kammerat det, den anden Tinsoldat! ja han er rigtignok lykkelig! – jeg kan ikke holde det ud!”

‘“Du er foræret bort!” sagde den lille Dreng, ‘'Du maa blive. Kan Du ikke indsee det?”’⁴²

‘“… Tell me, whether you all still sing on Sundays? Tell me a bit about little Maria! and how my comrade there is, the other Tin Soldier! Yes he is really fortunate! – I cannot stand it!”

‘“You have been given away as a present!” said the small boy, “you must stay. Can you not see that?”’

This (a repetition of a previous exchange) convinces as a dialogue between one in a superior position and his perceived inferior; while kind-hearted, the former sticks rigidly to an authority he has done nothing to deserve but accepts, dismissing the latter's feelings as irrelevant. (The contemporaneous The Two Baronesses also includes effective instances of this.) The inferior, on the other hand, emphatically does not accept the argument's justice, but loudly and indignantly repeats an earlier declaration: ‘Jeg vil i Krig! Jeg vil i Krig!’ ‘I will go to War! I will go to War!’43 He was made in warrior mould, but while living in the family had been able to accommodate his nature easily enough. Now in his lonely impatience he refuses to do so any longer. Having delivered his cri de coeur, he throws himself down in anger on the rotten floorboards, to fall down through one of the many cracks in them. Not even the old man can find him! This is, in quiet miniature, an earnest of 1848 revolutionaries. All over Europe, we feel, in the tumultuous years still to come of 1848 and 1849, there were young men, angry at their present lot and disappointed by treatment from their superiors, who realised their inherent aggression and went off to war – to disappear (often before seeing the combat they sought).

The day of the Tin Soldier's disappearance is the boy's last visit to the Old House. A week goes by, then many weeks; winter sets in, snow covers the decorated exterior of the house, and the boy – like Kay in ‘The Snow Queen’ – makes himself a hole in the frozen windowpane to look out from. The house appears very empty, and indeed is so; in the cold spell the old man has died. (And in his first outburst against his prison-like life, the Tin Soldier had predicted that the only thing that would ever happen to the Old Man would be his funeral.) In beautifully economic sentences the boy watches his coffin being taken from the house to the family grave in the countryside, noting the absence of mourners: the old man has survived his friends. Within a few days the auctioneers are stripping the Old House, even down to cupboards and flowerpots, while the once-loved portrait of the beautiful lady is bought back by its former junk-shop owner. With the spring – season of newness – the Old House is pulled down. And nobody is sorry – we do not hear of any regret even on the boy's part; children are resilient.

Endorsing the already created impression that the building long survived the meaning of its identity, Andersen gives us popular sentiment again: ‘“det var en Skrummel,” sagde Folk’,⁴⁴ ‘“it was a monstrosity,” said people’. … And this being the beginning of an age which value development per se, before long a new building goes up, ‘et deiligt Huus’,45 ‘a splendid house’ with large windows and ‘hvide, glatte Mure’, ‘white, smooth walls’, in contrast to medieval elaborations and jutting Shambles-like upper storeys. Instead of abutting directly on the street like old town houses, the new one is set back from the road from which it is separated by a garden with railings and an iron gate over which people like to look. We are now in the present bourgeois age when privacy demands a certain decorous ostentation, no question now of nodding to the occupant of a house opposite, or of those upstairs shaking hands across the street with their neighbours.

Andersen makes the years pass as rapidly, as gracefully as he did that winter in which the old man died. The boy has now grown into ‘en dygtig Mand’,⁴⁶ the Danish epithet denoting excellence, competence, reliability, of whom his parents are proud. Newly married he has come to live in the house built on the site of the old one that had once intrigued him so. He stands beside his young wife as she plants a wild flower in the garden, signifying her exemplary naturalness, her unaffected spontaneity of response, so needed in changing times. She pricks her finger on something that sticks up out of the soft soil, a Tin Soldier, which, pleased with her unexpected objet trouvé, she dries with first a green leaf, then her scented handkerchief. We readers are in no doubt as to who this is: the very toy soldier who had fallen through the rotten floor never to be found, and who therefore had spent at least a couple of decades unnoticed. Let me see him, asks the young husband, but his memories do not automatically come back in full: ‘Ja ham kan det nu ikke være, men han husker mig paa en Historie med en Tinsoldat jeg havde, da jeg var en lille Dreng!’⁴⁷ ‘It can't really be him, but he reminds me of a story about a tin soldier I had when I was a small boy!’ And he relates to his wife what we already know, how he had given the old man across the way one of his two soldiers to relieve his loneliness. And his wife is moved to tears. She is sure this must be the very same Tin Soldier, and for that reason will take great care of him. She would also like to visit the old man's grave, but her husband has no idea of its whereabouts so long ago was the man's death.

This (morally) beautiful episode, for all its domestic Biedermeier charm, is resonant with truths uncomfortable but necessary to accept. First we face up to the fact that, important though they may have seemed at the time, the small boy's dealings with the old man and the Tin Soldier have not retained their stature over the years. Time has reduced them, or broken them up, even inside the head of the person to whom they were of most significance. It is clear that he hasn't thought about them this long while, and even now is uncertain – despite the undeniable geographical evidence – that this really is his old Tin Soldier. We have a strong impression, indeed, that the young husband is not even certain of the actuality of these past occurrences: ‘en Historie med en Tinsoldat jeg havde’, ‘a story about a Tin Soldier I had’, nothing more specific or concrete. Yet – and this is the second truth, one more significant for a period of rapid change like the late 1840s than for a more settled, conservative one – we have the capacity to fashion our memories, or the fragments they have been reduced to, into meaningful wholes to assist us in our present and future lives. (Equally we are able to distort memories into agencies of destruction.) We feel here that the finding of the toy and the release of the past it contains will work creatively on the newly married couple. Does the discovery of the toy not make them think tenderly about the old man and his loneliness in life and in death?

Yet in the last paragraphs of the tale Andersen sounds the discordant notes used for the presentation of the Tin Soldier. Whatever has he been feeling all this long, long time? A kind of wry, ultimately stoical vindication of himself, it would seem at first, for he echoes the wife's view that the old man was ‘skrækkelig ene’, ‘terribly lonely’, but then, after hearing the pair go over his own story, ‘men deiligt er det, ikke at blive glemt’,48 ‘but it's splendid not to be forgotten’. In whatever incomplete form, and after whatever discontinuity, he and the old man have been remembered at last, as has the old vanished house which brought them all together. A further truth, and, if sensibly accepted, a reasonably assuring one.

Yet a fourth, less agreeable truth awaits us; once again the Tin Soldier is its medium. The gilded hangings on the walls of the Old House had a little rhyming motto which a bit of rag, all that's survived of them, now repeats: ‘“Forgyldning forgaaer,/Men Svinelæder bestaaer.” Dog det troede Tinsoldaten ikke’.⁴⁹ ‘“Gilding perishes,/But pigskin endures.” But that the Tin Soldier did not believe.’ And he was right not to do so. Finally everything must and does perish.

Why did the contemplation of tin soldiers bring Andersen to such heights of literary achievement? Perhaps admiration of their sterling qualities, of their neat mimesis of human beings at their most disciplined and hard-tested was united in his mind with overwhelming pity. All their orderliness and regimentation, all their smart appearance in the end got them nowhere, because – there was nowhere for them to go, at least nowhere commensurate with their innate (endowed) expectations? Whatever the explanation, among Andersen's unitary fairy tales – those proceeding by unswerving development of a single theme; ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Fir Tree’ are other major members of this group – ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ and ‘The Old House’ seem to me Andersen's most perfect achievements, the profoundest and the most extensive in their charity. But we could legitimately debate whether we should call ‘The Old House’ a fairy tale at all. Except for the talk of the Tin Soldier – easily accountable as a projection of the boy/the husband – its only supernatural element is its communication of the mystery of Time.

Did Dickens remember Andersen's Old House when, two years later, he described so vividly that of Mr Wickfield and Agnes, his hero's wife-to-be, in David Copperfield? It stands in Canterbury, a city decidedly similar to York:

At length we stopped before a very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long low lattice-windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved heads on the ends bulging out too, so that I fancied the whole house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the narrow pavement below. It was quite spotless in its cleanliness. The old-fashioned brass knocker on the low arched door, ornamented with carved garlands of fruit and flowers, twinkled like a star; the two stone steps descending to the door were as white as if they had been covered with fair linen; and all the angles and corners, and carvings and mouldings, and quaint little panes of glass, and quainter little windows, though old as the hills, were as pure as any snow that ever fell upon the hills.50

Mr Wickfield's house represents goodness and learning to David, newly released from the tyrannies of the Murdstones and his inadequate, broken schooling, yet the widower Mr Wicksteed is to feel lonely there, his situation undermined evilly by his clerk (and factotum, very unlike the one in Andersen's tale), Uriah Heep.

Again one wonders if the last pages of Andersen's story came into Dickens's head when, at the close of Great Expectations (1860–61) he sent Pip into the garden occupying the site of the extraordinary, rambling Satis House, the emotional and imaginative lodestar of his earlier years, and long since pulled down:

There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the wall of the old garden. The cleared space had been enclosed with a rough fence, and looking over it, I saw that some of the old ivy had struck root anew, and was growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin. A gate in the fence standing ajar, I pushed it open and went in. … I could trace where every part of the old house had been and where the brewery had been, and where the gates, and where the casks. I had done so, and was looking along the desolate garden-walk, when I beheld a solitary figure in it. … The figure of a woman. … I cried out: ‘Estella!’ ’⁵¹

But all these, interesting, even thought-provoking though they might be, are incidentals. Far more importantly, David Copperfield shows real affinities of concept, presentation, structure, vital subjects and themes to The Improvisatore which we know, from no lesser an authority than Andersen himself, Dickens read and admired. But we should reaffirm here that the pressures of industrialisation and the urgent related movements for political change – in England expressed in the Poor Law Board of 1847 and the Third Chartist Petition of 1848 – caused writers to re-examine their past, the effects of early years on the later formed personality. Their attempts to do so are, of course, correlatives for the transformation, at once stimulating and terrifying, of British society. The childhood memories contain possibly redemptive cameos of a more innocent world, but also pointers towards the harsh circumstances yet to come but now ubiquitous. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre came out in 1847, Thackeray's (The History of) Pendennis in 1848 (completed 1850). It is more than possible that these writers too had read The Improvisatore, to which, however, David Copperfield bears a closer resemblance, closer in a literal sense than it does to either of the English novels.

Andersen's and Dickens's novels are both first-person accounts of the subject's life from birth to eventual fulfilment in happy fruitful marriage, in both cases to a second (more mature) love. Dickens's own favourite among his books – entitled, in emulation of Thackeray, The Personal History of David Copperfield – opens: ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by somebody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night.’52

Despite the deliberate nod here to Sterne's Tristram Shandy, this announcement by David of the circumstances of his birth begins an infinitely fuller treatment of growing-up from infancy onwards and of the subject's realisation, often blocked by difficulties and obstacles not of his making, of innate expectations of fulfilment than any made in English prose to date; the similarities here to Antonio's in The Improvisatore must already be clear to readers. Like Antonio, David is a posthumous child (Antonio knows nothing about his father, and we know extremely little about David's); like Antonio again, David loses his mother (‘bewitching Mrs Copperfield’) at an early date, leaving the author free to explore child–adult relationships through a series of surrogate parents, one of whom, Peggotty, with her unstinting practical affection, surely recalls Domenica, the countrywoman whom Andersen would always declare was based on his own mother. Then Andersen and Dickens rely on deus ex machina figures – the Eccellenza, Betsy Trotwood – to make points about the benevolence to be found even in a largely hard-hearted and class-ridden society, and also about false or even detrimental mentors: Antonio's despicable headmaster Habbas Dahdah, David's terrible, sadistic Mr Creakle. Both Antonio and David are sensitive boys, unafraid of their own sensitivity – here their kinship to Romantic poetry rather than to eighteenth-century fiction is apparent – and they give us ample evidence of it in their frequently lyrical responses to places, events, even works of art (literary rather than visual in David Copperfield's case), as well as to kindly or admirable persons. David, like Antonio, relishes the theatre, while his love for the Norfolk he visits with the Peggottys and for its denizens, is decidedly reminiscent of Antonio away from Rome in the Campagna.

But the most important resemblance of all comes in the trio at the emotional centre of both novels: Antonio–Bernardo–Annunziata in The Improvisatore, David–Steerforth–Little Emily in David Copperfield. Antonio had known and been drawn to Annunziata when he was a boy and she a winning little girl, David knew Little Emily (in Norfolk) when both were at similar ages to those of Andersen's characters. This childhood familiarity will complicate their reactions to what happens at a later stage. Again Bernardo, the Senator's son, and Antonio from penniless obscurity are both at the same school, as are Steerforth and David, and the older boy accordingly wins the younger's grateful admiration, which the former cynically exploits. This situation continues when the older of the pair turns into a Byronic man about town, Steerforth making use of David to further his amorous designs, which involve the object of his friend's childhood daydreams. Furthermore, that amphibious streak in Antonio which Bernardo pronounces on is something in the schoolboy David that Steerforth is aware of:

‘Good night, young Copperfield,’ said Steerforth, ‘I'll take care of you.’

‘You're very kind,’ I gratefully returned. ‘I am very much obliged to you.’

‘You haven't got a sister, have you?’ said Steerforth, yawning.

‘No,’ I answered.

‘That's a pity,’ said Steerforth, ‘If you had one, I should think she would have been a pretty, timid, bright-eyed sort of girl. I should have liked to know her. Good night, young Copperfield.’53

The two school-friends meeting after an interval of some years is one of the great scenes in David Copperfield, indeed in all Dickens, and it may well remind us of Antonio and Bernardo meeting during the Roman Carnival after a far shorter length of time:

I was so filled with the play, and with the past – for it was, in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along – that I don't know when the figure of a handsome well-formed young man, dressed with a tasteful, easy negligence which I have reason to remember very well, became a real presence to me. But I recollect being conscious of his company without having noticed his coming in – and my still sitting, musing, over the coffee-room fire.

At last I rose to go to bed, much to the relief of the sleepy waiter. … In going towards the door, I passed the person who had come in, and saw him plainly. I turned directly, came back, and looked again. He did not know me, but I knew him in a moment.

At another time I might have wanted the confidence or the decision to speak to him, and might have put it off until next day, and might have lost him. But, in the then condition of my mind, where the play was still running high, his former protection of me appeared so deserving of my gratitude, and my old love for him overflowed my breast so freshly and spontaneously, that I went up to him at once, with a fast-beating heart, and said:

‘Steerforth! Won't you speak to me?’

He looked at me – just as he used to look, sometimes – but I saw no recognition in his face.

‘You don't remember me, I'm afraid,’ said I.

‘My God!’ he suddenly exclaimed. ‘It's Little Copperfield!’54

This could hardly be better or more honestly done. But one might wish that Dickens had followed Andersen in granting Steerforth a less melodramatic and therefore more open ending than the death by drowning eventually accorded him, involving as it does the death of the seduced girl's affianced and an overwritten pathetic fallacy of violent weather. Though Dickens shows far greater knowledge of young men's dealings with the opposite sex in David Copperfield than Andersen does in The Improvisatore, he is, probably for that very reason, more guilty than the older writer of distorting truth to suit pharisaic elements in his society: not just Steerforth's death but the treatment of Little Emily and Martha, the prostitute, flying in the face of likelihood. But both The Improvisatore and David Copperfield fail in their endings, and in similar ways for, I suspect, ultimately similar reasons. To make an ‘I’ narrator tell of the happiness to which he has won through and praise the woman who has made it possible is a hard enough task in any instance, but it is made harder by the writer having no experience at all of sustained union with a woman (Andersen), or failing to feel for a wife (and even children) that committed devotion in which he professed to believe (Dickens). David Copperfield ends, like the earlier Dickens's novels, in a familial stasis which might have met the self-deceiving dreams of middle-class readers but which would fiercely have dissatisfied their creator. Yet isn't this also true of our final pictures of Antonio himself? Antonio's character, as we have seen, responded to an improvisatore's life, to wandering, random encounters, adventures and to the art which drew on his temperamental qualities; the protracted idyll was never part of his life. Dickens was less like the comfortable middlebrow novelist David Copperfield becomes (a successful one too, though it's hard to envisage his books) than he was like the compelling, fitful Steerforth.

Andersen's copy of David Copperfield was sent to him by Dickens himself. It must have brought back warmest memories of England. He read the novel with enormous and deeply felt admiration. ‘I often think I live in the same house as you,’55 he told Dickens in his letter of thanks. But that remark was even more true than Andersen appreciated, for both writers faced the difficulties consequent on the admiration their work had engendered – and their own apparent need for it, coexisting with psychological needs of a different, infinitely less amenable nature.

The first fourteen chapters of David Copperfield constitute an unassailable mythopoeic masterpiece which has entered the English psyche and spoken to generations of readers all over the world on account of its intensity and truthfulness. After these David makes a ‘new beginning’ and, for all its beauties, the novel lowers its emotional temperature considerably, and (even remembering the unforgettable Uriah Heep) reduces its confrontations with what in life is hard, even impossible to assimilate. Dickens's later novels, under pressure from personal problems and overpowering social change, eschew the forced serenity of his most directly autobiographical novel. To take the supreme example, Great Expectations (1860), told, like David Copperfield, in the first person, demands and receives a very different resolution from that accorded the hero of the earlier novel, and both the endings Dickens wrote for the novel do justice to the tragic elements which have engulfed Pip.

Andersen too surely demanded in the depths of his nature something in addition to all the generous attention and hospitality from the royal couple, from the Hereditary Grand Duke of Weimar, from Mendelssohn, the Schumanns and Liszt with his Princess Consort, and all the many other high-born and famous folk he was disposed to mingle with. In the tragic war years for Denmark so soon to come, Andersen faced challenges the meeting of which, if it gave him indisputable anxiety, pain and sadness, brought out something strong, even tough in him. He had already in the depths of his psyche anticipated them, because he had seen the dark occurrences of the war manifested, if in miniature, long before they were reality, in scene after scene of his early years, informed as they were by suspicion, fear and aggression. He had sensed these as perpetually latent in human, indeed animal experience, and he would never forget the confirmation of this harsh truth that the dreadful events afforded him. The major works still ahead of him would, like Great Expectations, not forfeit the tragic in their resolution. At their pinnacle stands a novella virtually the contemporary of Dickens's masterpiece, ‘Iisjomfruen’ (‘The Ice Maiden’, 1861). Though it nowhere deals with the sorrows of the Three Years' War – his most flawed novel, ‘At være eller ikke være’ (‘To be or not to be’, 1857) will do this, in its striking and memorable pages of reportage, which form perhaps its most completely successful section – it is fair to say that this short masterpiece could not have been written without first-hand experience of them.

3

In April 1848 William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette, printed an impassioned open letter signed Hans Christian Andersen. This is its second paragraph:

You know how it is at this moment in Denmark. We have war! but a war that is carried on by the whole enthusiastic Danish people; a war wherein the noble and lowly born, inspired with this just cause, voluntarily places himself in the ranks of battle. It is this enthusiasm that I must paint to you: this love of our country, which fills, and elevates the whole Danish nation.56

His diary, however, sees the war in less generic and more painfully individual terms, as in this entry for 13 May:

Heard a good deal about the battle: the men shot in the chest or head had lain as if they were asleep; those shot in the abdomen had been unrecognizable because their faces were so convulsively distorted with pain. One had lain literally ‘biting the dust’ with his teeth; his hands had clutched at the turf. … Lundbye [the Danish artist responsible for the picture that inspired ‘The Little Match-Girl’], the officers told me, had been standing dejectedly leaning on his rifle; some farmers were passing by close to where the other rifles were propped up in front of him and happened to knock them over. They heard the shot and saw Lundbye fall to the ground, shot from below upward through the chin, his mouth torn and a piece of flesh with a beard on it shot away. He emitted a few weak sighs; was wrapped in the Danish flag and buried. Lieutenant Høst, who is staying here, wept.⁵⁷

1848 was indeed a watershed year for Europe, for Denmark, and psychologically for Andersen himself, and it would have the profoundest effects on his later art. Andersen wrote in his autobiography: ‘The year 1848 arrived, a strange year, a volcanic year, in which the great waves of time also swept with murderous force across my native land.’⁵⁸

On 20 January 1848 King Christian VIII died of blood poisoning aged sixty-one. Andersen had maintained the good relations with him cemented by his stay on Føhr, and indeed had accepted an invitation in early January to take tea with him ‘and bring something with me to read’. The King seemed animated enough, though he had to lie down during the visit, laughing as before at some of the tales and hearing ‘a couple of chapters from my [unfinished] novel, The Two Baronesses.’ But he deteriorated, as became publicly known, and Andersen, feeling anxious and fearing they were imminently to lose him, went out every day to the Amalienborg Palace to find out about his health. When he heard of his death he felt disconsolate ‘and so painfully moved I became ill’.59 A man of very different character, Søren Kierkegaard, recorded in his Journal only warm, laudatory memories of Christian VIII: ‘He said many flattering things to me and begged me to visit him. … He also said something about my having so many ideas, and so couldn't I give him some.’⁶⁰

What kind of king, though, had Christian been? He had succeeded his cousin Frederik VI (1768–1839), who, though just as progenitive as himself, had left no heir. Frederik, on account of his father's mental instability, had been for twenty-four years Crown Prince Regent of Denmark and Norway (1784–1808) and for thirty-one years King of Denmark (six of them as King of Norway also). Andersen was to put Frederik's character and death into his principal literary production of 1848, The Two Baronesses.

Half British on his mother's side, Frederik had both his regency and his reign made difficult by Britain, which carried out devastating pre-emptive onslaughts on Danish shipping for strategic reasons. By 1814 and the defeat of the Napoleonic France with which he had been forced to side, Frederik was monarch of a bankrupt country stripped of any international bargaining position, epitomised above all by the handing over by the victorious powers of Norway to Sweden. This led to an increased authoritarianism on his part, and of abjuration of the liberal policies he had followed as Regent, the most famous of which was the ground-breaking abolition of slavery in 1788. The court of Frederik – which, we must remember, Jonas Collin served and of which Andersen had been a young beneficiary – imposed censorship on the press and brooked little overt criticism, though by the later 1830s, after an upturn in the economy, the Estate Assemblies were set up to articulate concerns of the different regions.

The far more appealing figure of Christian VIII, of whom his cousin Frederik had been generally somewhat suspicious, seemed to promise a more thorough modernisation, and liberal elements were hopeful that he would steer Denmark towards democratic Constitutional Monarchy. A good-looking, charming man, he was devoted to literature and science, as was his second wife Caroline Amalie, herself a passionate admirer of Grundtvig and disposed to discuss dreams and spiritual intimations with Andersen during his stay on Føhr. (He was to keep up a friendship with her after her husband's death.) Christian held principles in advance of his ability (or possibly even his wholehearted inclination) to act in support of them. Hopes placed in him were disappointed. Over the dominant Schleswig-Holstein question – Spørgsmålet om Sønderjylland [Slesvig] og Holsten – Christian displayed indecision until 1846, and then took a clear stand only over Schleswig.⁶¹

By now the Liberal faction in Denmark wished the legally anomalous position of the two duchies to end. Schleswig (Sønderjylland, South Jutland) where there was a clear, nationalist-minded Danish-speaking majority should be incorporated into Denmark. This would mean, however, its abandoning its medieval Salic law blocking any heir to the Danish throne through the female line, and bringing its administration into step with that of Denmark proper. Holstein, closely affiliated under international law to Schleswig though it was and sharing its law of succession (and, like its fellow duchy in connection specifically with the Danish king), presented a morally and empirically more difficult situation. Here the majority, a sizeable one, was German-speaking, and indeed, as a former constituent of the Holy Roman Empire, Holstein was also a member of the German Confederation (to which the King of Denmark was therefore a signatory). Post-Napoleonic nationalism encouraged pride in regional history and lore everywhere, and in the German lands this was stimulated by the pronouncements of such pundits as Jacob Grimm who considered Jutland original German territory and the Danes but arrivistes. All this intensified Holsteiners' feelings about their identity and the future appropriate to it, and greatly complicated the issue of the duchies' presence in any reformed ‘new’ Denmark. Holstein being anyway a profoundly conservative society, the more straightforward-seeming proposals seemed likely to result in a veritable tangle of legalistic paradoxes. No wonder Lord Palmerston famously said that only three persons understood the Schleswig-Holstein Question, one of whom was himself – and he had forgotten it!

On Christian VIII's death, Frederik VII (1808–63) was expected to accomplish what his father had failed to achieve: Denmark would become a Constitutional Monarchy (and indeed proclamation to this effect was made on 28 January while the late king was still lying in state) and Schleswig-Holstein would be accorded a proper working settlement, the two appearing a single matter in progressive minds. On 20 and 21 March crowds demonstrated in Copenhagen, to make their views plain to the King in Christianborg Castle, and Andersen was one of those chosen by the Committee of Order to be a steward and see that the marches and meetings didn't get out of hand. Such expressions of popular feeling were made in the wake of the much-bruited protests by the French in Paris on 22–24 February, against which Louis Philippe's government had employed military force, and also of the subsequent revolutions that followed the Parisian example: Vienna on 13 March, Berlin on 18 March. In all instances, and notably in Denmark, the professional classes made up a good section of those voicing their principled discontent and expectations.

Their claims and the royal response to them were over-interpreted in Kiel, the main city of Schleswig-Holstein and centre of German nationalism, where it was thought that the separation of the two duchies had actually been decided. A provisional Kiel government was proclaimed on 24 March, and while the Duke of Augustenborg (Andersen's several-times host whose views had so disturbed him) went off to seek aid from Prussia, his friend (and Andersen's co-guest) Prince Frederik of Nør headed a rifle corps and students from Kiel University seized the duchies' armoury at Rendsburg. By 31 March the port of Flemsborg in Schleswig was occupied by soldiers from both duchies, 7,000 of them, to be assailed by a matching number of soldiers from the Danish army proper. Andersen published in the newspaper Fædrelandet (‘The Fatherland’) patriotic verses ‘Slagsang for de Danske’ (‘Battle Song for the Danes’).62 The consequent Battle of Bov on 9 April was a victory for Denmark under General Hans Hedemann. But when the Prussian troops arrived bringing with them soldiers from other parts of the German Confederacy, the character of the conflict changed.

The second battle of the war, the Battle of Schleswig on 23 April, begun on a cold, wet morning, saw a terrible defeat for Denmark. The Prussian forces under General Wrangel (who believed in the war offensive far more strongly than his comparatively equivocal king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV), were, at 18,000 strong, three times the size of the Danish, who suffered 170 men dead (as opposed to 41 Prussians), 463 wounded and 258 taken prisoner. Prussia – in this year of change and people's power – believed it was helping a genuine democratic uprising, a sympathetic attitude in ironic contrast to its stances elsewhere. Sweden, Russia and Britain, on the other hand, all anxious not to see Prussia a major Baltic power, took the part of Denmark. The Battle of Schleswig enabled the Prussians to invade Jutland.

Nevertheless, with auxiliaries from Norway and Sweden arriving in Fyn, their warm reception by the locals glowingly described by Andersen in his autobiography, and a stiffening of Danish morale after the Schleswig defeat, the war went quite well for Denmark in 1848. By the end of May the Germans began evacuating soldiers from Jutland. There was a strong Danish victory at Dybbøl Mølle on 5 June, and by 26 August, Prussia, under a king very anxious not to antagonise other European powers, acceded to many Danish demands, to the indignation of the Estates of Holstein. The ceasefire of 1 September held for eight months, but realists must have seen that it would never prove durable.

Andersen's fairly prompt apologia for his country in the Literary Gazette had been published and circulated in international periodicals, including German ones, as were his poems. He had expressed his great grief at public events to the German friend by now emotionally dearest to him, the Hereditary Grand Duke of Weimar;⁶³ he had befriended and celebrated Danish and Swedish participants in the war, and his novel that year could certainly be viewed as the work of a patriot, indeed of a patriot committed to the new Denmark. This didn't stop him being the target of snide remarks the following year – by Jonas Collin's daughter, Ingeborg Drewsen among others – to the effect that he wasn't sufficiently whole-heartedly patriotic, as he stilll maintained close relationships with Germany. There was always an edge to his compatriots' reception of him as a public figure, which derived ultimately from an unwillingness to recognise his international standing, let alone that it might be deserved.

But might Andersen's attitudes to the war not in truth have been entirely consistent? Maybe he did not always feel as he did when he wrote his exhortatory verses? Remembering his not infrequent derogatory statements about his own country, he may well have entertained thoughts not dissimilar to those of his ‘antagonist’, Kierkegaard, who in his Journal for early 1848 wrote:

All this fear of Germany is imagination, a game, a new attempt to flatter national vanity. One million people who honestly admitted that they were a small nation, and each, before God and on his own account, resolved to be no more would constitute an enormous power; here there would be no danger. No, the disaster is something quite different; it is that this small nation is demoralized, divided against itself, disgustingly envious man to man, refractory towards anyone who wants to govern, petty-minded with anybody who is somebody, impudent and undisciplined, dredged up into a kind of mob tyranny. This gives people a bad conscience, and that is why the Germans are feared. But no one dares say where the trouble truly lies, and so one flatters all these unhealthy passions and acquires self-importance by taking on the Germans.

Denmark is facing a nasty period. The market-town spirit and mutual petty meanness: it will end with one being suspected of being German if one doesn't wear a certain kind of hat, etc.64

4

‘I made great progress on my novel;’ wrote Andersen in his diary on 22 May, only a week and a day after he had recorded those agonising war scenes and about a book that would come out during the long lull in the conflict; ‘later in the day a title for it occurred to me – The Two Baronesses. Today is a great day for ushering a novel into the world!’⁶⁵ To us now it is hard to believe his title wasn't (as in the case of The Improvisatore) present in Andersen's mind from the very start of work on the book, so completely do the two eponymous women not only give it shape but endow it with artistic and thematic unity. They are not blood relations, neither comes from the aristocracy herself, and neither significantly espouses it once having joined it. By the end of the novel these two outsiders in eminent social positions are mother- and daughter-in-law. The harmony of the ending confirms that ambivalent exclamation in the diary just quoted. The Two Baronesses, started before the war, written during some of its bloodiest months and completed after the ceasefire, is, to an important extent, a novel celebrating Denmark as a nation state, a refutation of the kind of opinion of the country held by Kierkegaard above and by Andersen himself (if far less dogmatically) in his darker moods. It gives us the diversity of its landscapes and peoples in a virtually e pluribus unum spirit. It also forms (though it ends when Christian VIII has been on the throne four years) a tribute to the country's progression towards socio-political modernity, about which Kierkegaard was suspicious. The enlightened new constitution bringing the Absolute Monarchy to an end would come into full effect on 5 June 1849. Certainly this novel contains incidents and speeches more uncompromisingly and overtly critical of the Danish ancien régime than anything Andersen had written so far. And it implies that, if gradually, these can be consigned to the past.

The novel's beginnings in Andersen's mind date, as we have already noted, from summer 1847, before the death of Christian VIII and the Three Years War and contemporaneous with his visit to Britain. Scotland and his appreciation there of how Scott did literary justice to an entire country stand behind the book, and interestingly he reread two Scott novels while in the thick of work on it (May 1848): The Heart of Midlothian, which directly inspired its central action, and Rob Roy, which must surely have confirmed his desire to cover large tracts of territory in its course. And that book's distinction between life below and above the Highland Line informs, I believe, Andersen's own between the body of Denmark on the one hand – above all Sjælland and Fyn – and, on the other, southern Jutland, with the wild, sparsely populated Halligen Islands off its west coast doing service for the Hebrides and Orkneys which had so captured Scott's imagination.

Andersen noted that Scott reserved his greatest creative energies for novels set in, and interpreting, the past – though St Ronan's Well (1823),66 which he had read as recently as November 1845, has a contemporary setting, a spa reflecting current fashions. His own fiction-writing instincts led him to follow his characters' fortunes from a given date in the past up to the present day, at which point he will examine how they are faring. Once again Andersen is exemplarily specific about dates. Written as it was in the year of Christian VIII's death, Andersen's book includes, as it moves towards its close, the death of his predecessor, Frederik VI, on 3 December 1839. On 14 August the following year, the older baroness's birthday, her grandson, Herman, and Elisabeth, the novel's heroine realise their mutual love, and we learn that Elisabeth is only sixteen years of age. Because we were present at her birth in sad, harsh circumstances, this amounts to a confirmation for us of its date: 1824. After Elisabeth and Herman's marriage we move on, we are told, four years. Therefore when the old baroness dies, at peace but still mindful of the terrible injustices of the not so distant past, we have arrived at 1844, that period of great creative and social achievement for Andersen. This must have have seemed all the more worth treasuring in view of the tensions and tragedies of these months of the Three Years War, which had not, for all the welcomed respite, come to its conclusion. It was also the year when Andersen stayed on Føhr, one of the places most vital to the novel.

Both baronesses come from a social obscurity not so far removed from Andersen's own. The elder is the daughter of a peasant-smallholder or sharecropper, ‘lange’ (long) Rasmus, who, for complaining about the drudgery he was forced into, to pay the Fyn landowner, the Baron, his rent, is given a grotesquely cruel punishment.67 He is compelled to ride a ‘wooden horse’, a thin plank on two poles across which he is placed with two heavy bricks on his legs that pull him perpetually towards the ground, which he is nevertheless unable to reach. His strong-willed three-year-old daughter, Dorothea, horrified at seeing her father's sufferings, tries to slip stones into the gaps under his feet, but the old baron sees her doing this and slashes her savagely with a whip. Her pregnant mother, Hannah, tries to intervene and the Baron kicks her, causing injuries from which she dies. (This appalling punishment, preserved in Fyn lore, made such a great impression on Andersen when he heard about it that he uses it also in his fine historical late story, ‘Hønse-Grethes Familie’, (‘Chicken Grethe's Family’, 1870).⁶⁸

The Baron drinks himself to death from apoplexy, and his reckless-living son proves almost as bad a character, but not cruel. He falls in love with Dorothea, who, after her parents' death, has been brought up by the village schoolmaster, and the two marry. After his early death, she comes into her own as Baroness of a large estate, able through her position and wealth to indulge in, even cultivate, her wilful eccentricity. None of her children survive her, but her grandson Herman does. Her coolness to him over the years, refusing to see him – he is a talented, largely kind-hearted young man of handsome appearance with jet-black eyes – has a rational explanation. On her travels through Italy the Baroness's late daughter was assaulted by an Italian, who made her pregnant. It will thus be clear that, for all her attractive defiance of convention, and awareness of what the high and mighty do to the lowly, the Baroness is not immune to the faults of the rank she has entered; her capricious taking up and dropping of people she owes to a rich Copenhagen hostess, Fru Bügel who turned against Andersen socially for reasons he never discovered. She also points up the disagreeable truth that sufferings do not always make their victim sympathetic or tolerant; they can often have the opposite effect.

The arrival in this world of Elisabeth, our second Baroness, is the business of the arresting and atmospheric first chapters of the novel, which are a creative ‘take’ on those of The Bride of Lammermoor. Stormy weather makes three well-born young men from Copenhagen, amateur sailors, and their tutor, Moritz, a Holsteiner, put up on the coast of Fyn opposite the island of Langeland, though their destination was the estate of Count Frederik's father between Svendborg and Fåborg. Count Frederik decides they should instead take shelter that night in a tumbledown property close by, which is being done up for him by order of his father: ‘en reen Røverkule at see til, men ganske romantisk’,69 ‘a real Robber's den to look at, but quite romantic’. This is a virtual reworking of the arrival at near-ruinous Ravenswood in Scott's novel, and in Christen the caretaker we have a modified version of its Caleb Balderstone. But Andersen's young men – though they have a certain class hauteur – show themselves as far more civilised than Scott's, as their talk while bedding down for the night reveals. They tell hunting and shooting anecdotes, bringing to mind the exploits of Scott's characters which feature a repellent, indeed nauseating description of a stag kept long and ruthlessly at bay. By contrast Andersen's young men admit that, while they take pride in their marksmanship, depriving an animal of life can trouble their hearts and consciences. Herman, more the hero of this novel than anybody else, the older Baroness's grandson, relates how once he looked into the large brown eyes of a seal he'd just shot ‘og det var, ligesom jeg havde skudt et Menneske’.⁷⁰ ‘and it was as if I had shot a man’. And, very significantly, it is precisely as he makes this sympathetic confession that a strange sound in the ruin is heard.

A young woman – recognised by the old servant as the wife of a local peripatetic musician – has entered the manor-house courtyard to escape from the storm, and collapses, giving birth before she dies to a child, a girl. This is Elisabeth, the heroine. All the young men and Moritz, their tutor, take a solemn oath that same night to look after her, to be her godparents, but one of them – Herman, who has just voiced fellow feeling for animals – will become her husband, making this girl, born of misery and poverty, the second Baroness of the title.

In fact Elisabeth spends her first five years with Herman's aunt, the Baroness, and falls foul of her. Every year, on her birthday, the Baroness retreats into a special chamber in her country residence, greatly arousing speculative gossip. Little Elisabeth determines to find out what she is doing, appropriates her key, and enters the secret room to see dominating it a portrait of an old man – the former Baron, the Baroness's own father-in-law, apoplectically red in the face and angry in expression. The Baroness pays him an annual visit to remind herself of the enemy whose son she married and whose estate she inherited. But when she discovers Elisabeth out in her clandestine room, she has the little girl expelled from the household. The eventual result of this piece of imperious cruelty – for which Andersen, faithful to his scheme, forgives her a little too comprehensively – is that Elisabeth goes to live with the oldest member of the group present at her birth, Holsteiner and widower Moritz Nommesen, pastor, whose sister keeps house for him, on one of the Halligen archipelago: ‘Halligerne, de stille Øer i den stormende Nordsø’, ‘the Halligen, the calm islands in the stormy North Sea.’71 The setting of her formative years – for which Andersen drew on his memories and diary entries from his time on Føhr with the royal couple- – is vital to the novel's meaning.

Andersen back in 1844⁷² took the keenest interest in the geography and traditions of these islands, obviously, off the Schleswig-Holstein coast as they are, of greater political significance in the year in which he was writing than when he had stayed there. Linguistically they fascinated him; you could hear Danish, German, a dialect of Danish so heavily influenced by German it was hard to understand, Frisian (which he noted as close to English, indeed together they form the Ingweonic branch of Germanic languages) and Fering, a North Frisian dialect in use both publicly and privately on Føhr itself. Thus the Halligen form a microcosm of Schleswig and Holstein, and a paradigm, even a template for the kingdom of Denmark itself, where North Jutland (Otto's ancestral home in O.T.) hosts interesting independent dialects, and Bornholm, far to the east of both Denmark proper and the south of Sweden, speaks bornholmsk, which, with its three genders and an archaic phonology, is closer to dialects of Skåne, Sweden than to ordinary Danish. Elisabeth's foster-father is a Holsteiner who has grown up near Itzehoe, the Duchy's oldest city with a castle built by Charlemagne and set in country comparatively rich agriculturally. But he feels, as he nears the islands he is to serve as a cleric, an affinity with their culture, with the gables of their houses, the layout of their farms with their big gateways.

The islanders clung tenaciously to their traditions, which Andersen noted down on his visit, often with less immediate attraction to them than he conveys in the novel. In the first Frisian-speaking village he arrived at ‘people were not very polite, not a single hello; and if you said hello to them you got a brusque nod; no one took his hat off’.⁷³ He wrote that life could be very hard, and this we appreciate from the context of Elisabeth's, comfortable and protected though she herself is. The fields in which cattle graze are flooded by seawater for many weeks of the year; most of the men have to turn to the sea for their livelihood, risky fishing or whaling expeditions as far away as Greenland (and here Andersen shows a commendable transcendence of time and location by making one of the islanders feelingly evoke the intelligence of whales and their ability to care for one another). Many of the women on the island are widows.

Elisabeth grows up in an atmosphere of puritan devotion (at prayer meetings the women dress in mourning-style garments with linen kerchiefs half concealing their faces), home education and, encouraged by this, the reading of Walter Scott who, she feels, expresses the truths about existence itself. But she isn't proof against sexual attraction. The Commander's son, Elimar, appeals to her heart, at fourteen a seaman and an active sportsman with a gun, something of a rip, some of whose mischievous antics – the teasing of the tame jackdaw and the cat, ending with the death of the former – are downright unkind. But Elisabeth misses him greatly while he is away, and the dreams and fantasies she entertains about him in his lengthening absence are based on an unreal, not to say erroneous, picture of his personality. He joins a Dutch ship to acquire a more scientific grasp of navigation and sea-craft, spends time in Holland itself, where he is extremely happy, and then – after several rumours of scapegrace activities have travelled back to the Halligen – becomes Second Mate on a large vessel bound for North America. For a while there is silence about his doings, then appalling news. No, not that he is dead, but that he is in a Copenhagen prison, in fetters, for having killed the First Mate in a brawl. Elisabeth, trying not to listen to stories of the wild Frisian ancestry of Elimar's that includes killers who suffer both remorse and punishment, is filled with sorrow until she remembers her best-loved book: Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian. She will do as its heroine Jeanie Deans did, make a journey across country (an equally long and strenuous one, as it happens) and beg from her king (Frederik VI) a reprieve for her convicted loved one.

And here Andersen has an ingenious surprise awaiting us. Elisabeth is indeed granted an audience – not with the King as hoped, for he has seen too many people that day – but with the object of her journey itself. Here is Elimar Leyson, she is told – but it is not he. She insists that he isn't Elimar, and finally gets the truth out of the prisoner (whom in fact she knows): he is Jes Jappen, a servant's son back in the Halligen, who has used Elimar's papers. Elimar himself is about to get married to a rich widow in the United States. What was set up to be a grand emotional scene has, in truth, a quality of dark farce, because, for Jappen, his life is every bit as important as Elimar's.

There are two further surprises. Elisabeth is taken up by a shady widow and a twenty-year-old seamstress assistant of hers, Adelgunde. Their principal business is persuading men to part with money ostensibly for charity or small services, an exertion not so far removed from those of Andersen's Copenhagen aunt and her attendant girls as they would profess themselves to be. In the course of her association with the widow and her girls Elisabeth calls at an apartment where she finds two friendly men, both connected with the day of her birth on the Fyn estate: Baron Holger, now a roué who likes the company of girls and women of diverse kinds, and his great friend Baron Herman, the eccentric Baroness's grandson, who, for all his bohemian streak, is an honourable, kindly, sensitive man. That day the love of Herman and Elisabeth for each other begins. The second surprise is that, while she is still in Copenhagen, the object of her ambitious venture, King Frederik, who has in his long regal career raised and dashed so many hopes, and, qualifiedly, raised them again, dies. In the mythology of the young, kings and queens cannot die; that this one does provides an awakening in Elisabeth to life's realities outside even the admirable pages of Scott.

Elisabeth like Gerda in ‘The Snow Queen’ and Scott's Jeanie Deans stands at her story's centre, performs its most adventurous and praiseworthy feat, of a kind usually reserved in both literature and life for males, and is its most sympathetic and fully drawn figure. She differs from Jeanie and Gerda in being intellectually inclined, in fact an embryonic literary artist. Though, when her lover reads and comments somewhat critically (and to us patronisingly) on her writings and she protests that she is only writing for herself – how many gifted and original nineteenth-century women must have felt themselves obliged to make this reply! – we are left in little doubt that she will continue her literary endeavours. Whatever its application to Elisabeth's own efforts, Herman's remarks about the novel form have impressive resonance: ‘I Romanen vil jeg ikke have Begivenheder alene, men Charakteer og Poesie…’74 ‘In the novel I will not have events alone, but character and poetry.’

Poetry – especially in the description of the Langeland coast and the Halligen islands – The Two Baronesses does contain, and humour too, that constant and individual presence in Andersen – notably in the figure of the Kammerjunker (Chamberlain), a rootless artistic jack of all trades fuller of plans than attainments, and, though inspiring affection, often treated as a social inferior. He is a parodic version of the author himself. The activities of the widow-lady and her young companion are portrayed with a refreshing freedom from the mounting bourgeois morality of the age. But ‘character’ – by which we means the portrayal of human beings in depth so that their emotions, behaviour and experiences alike address our own being – no, here The Two Baronesses is deficient. Even the heroine we feel is schematically manipulated into, to use Herman's essentially pejorative term where novels are concerned, ‘Begivenheder’, ‘events’. Not only does she fail to partake of Jeanie Deans's individuality and culture (Scott is at pains to show his heroine's Covenanter roots), but we have the uneasy feeling that the action in which she emulates Scott's heroine has been decided by the author too long in advance so that it does not fully accord with her whole personality as it has developed. Most of the other dramatis personae are brief walk-on parts: Count Frederik, Baron Holger, even Elimar, and the more sympathetic Moritz and Herman lack the solility and hence the significance intended for them. Maybe then the whole book is too voulu, its fundamentally amiable intentions too conscious and thus too near the surface for this to match Andersen's work in his now-preferred medium, the tale. Maybe too – despite that near-jocular entry of his in his diary – the times were too demanding for Andersen to give his mind and his heart to a full-scale work of this kind. And maybe negative mental rumblings – if not as disagreeable as those of Kierkegaard's Journal – did prevent a sustained mood of confidence.

5

On 23 February 184975 the truce ended with the result that on 2 April fighting resumed. At January's London Conference which had seemed to be acceptable not only to Prussia but to the German Confederation as a whole, Denmark refused to give way on the Duchies' unbreakable tie to the Danish crown. This was to be a year of victories for the Danes, but each victory came with severe losses: Adsbøl (3 April over Schleswig-Holsteiner troops), Dybbøl Mølle (13 April over troops from the German Confederation), Vejlby, 31 May preventing another Prussian advance into Jutland, and decisively Fredericia on 6 July. All this ended in a truce on 10 July as doomed as the first: Schleswig to be administered separately from Holstein, which would be ruled by a German vice-regent.

Andersen travelled in Sweden from 17 May to 16 August, gathering the material he would use for his lyrical travelogue expressing faith in humanity, I Sverrig (In Sweden, 1851),⁷⁶ which would come out in Britain and Germany as well as Denmark. When he returned, it was to a country not only thankfully enjoying a temporary peace but able to congratulate itself on having become a democratic Constitutional Monarchy: universal male suffrage, a two-chamber parliament, freedom of speech and of religious worship. From lagging behind Western Europe Denmark advanced to its vanguard in respect of civilian rights.

The Schleswig-Holstein question, however, was still not settled. Prussia, not of one mind anyway on the matter, was exhausted and therefore prepared to postpone demands for the Duchies indefinitely. So 2 July 1850 saw the signing at Berlin of a peace treaty between Denmark and Prussia which – at least in its own eyes – gave the former the ability to deal with the recalcitrant in Schleswig-Holstein as it judged best. The Battle of Isted (Istedt) fought on 25 July from the very earliest hours until evening and inspiring a poem by N.F.S Grundtvig himself, ‘Det var en Sommermorgen’,⁷⁷ ‘It was a summer morning’, effectively smashed the Holstein army. One of the fallen on the Danish side was Frederik Læssøe, officer-son of Andersen's friend and mentor Signe, and Andersen mourned the cutting off of a talented individual's life.⁷⁸ Andersen would commemorate the battle in ‘To Be or Not To Be’ Essentially the tide had turned against the Duchies, and attempts by the Schleswig-Holstein commander, General Karl Wilhelm von Willisen, to provoke other German states into rallying against the Danes failed. The Danes were successful at the Battle of Lottorf, 24 November 1850, but decided not to pursue their enemy; there were no Danish dead and only one Schleswig-Holsteiner fatality. In early 1851 the Danish troops started to come home, and Andersen joined in all the jubilations: ‘Life has been rekindled in people,’ he wrote in his diary on 9 February, ‘the old despondency is gone. They're on the move; they get together; they have been restored to an awareness of themselves and a sense of brotherhood.’79 He listened with fascination to the stories of returning men, celebrated them in verses of his own and edited a compilation of poems and songs written during the Three Years War for distribution to the soldiers. Peace itself was to be confirmed in the (second) London protocol of 8 May 1852 affirming the integrity of Denmark (the Royal Danish Federation) as a ‘European necessity and standing principle’; Schleswig and Holstein were to be treated as separate entities, the one not enjoying any closer relation to the Danish crown than the other but each bound to it, as its head.

Whatever the good outcome of Treårskriget, Andersen was frequently depressed in its aftermath. To have known that peaceful, respectable members of his nation had ended up with blood and faeces streaming out of their shot-punctured abdomens or their nerves shattered by their witnessing of these horrors naturally affected the equilibrium of his mind. Besides, 1850 and 1851 were sad personally for Andersen, for reasons adumbrated in our Introductory section: figures of the Golden Age who had been both mentors and friends were coming to the end of their life. On 20 January 1850 Adam Oehlenschläger died, peacefully with his children around him, listening to the testimony of Socrates about eternal life. For all his younger man's rivalry with him, and the doubts he had sometimes expressed on the universal merits of all his works, Andersen had admired him and been fond of him, noting that relations between them had greatly improved of late, and besides he believed him to be the first among Nordic poets. His death was ‘a great sorrow for me, – a sorrow too for Denmark and the realm of art’.⁸⁰

Dearer still in a personal sense, and a constant inspiration as writer and thinker, had been H.C. Ørsted. He had fallen ill in the early days of March 1851, but believed he would get better; Andersen did not think so. Ørsted died on 9 March; Andersen had been in his house all day, and had slipped out to walk to the Collins' when the death actually occurred. ‘It was almost too much for me to bear. … Ørsted, whom I had known and come to love through almost all the years I had been in Copenhagen. He was one of those most interested and understanding throughout the varying fortunes of my life. … It felt as though my heart were going to break.’⁸¹ Jens Andersen in his Life is particularly strong on Andersen's relationship with the man who had perceived qualities in Andersen that not even Jonas Collin had done, who was sure that his extraordinary imagination would create works (far from being runners-up to the productions of Oehlenschläger and Ingemann) of altogether unique, and in truth immortal quality. Ørsted's great last work, Aanden i Naturen (The Spirit in Nature, two volumes, 1850/51),82 seemed to Andersen the very consummation of his chief intellectual guide's profound thinking about existence: that the human mind mirrors the complexities the scientist can scrutinise in all forms of Nature, serving to illustrate the workings of a spiritual force both in and behind the universe itself. Jens Andersen believes that Ørsted saw Andersen as the chief literary representative of his ideas. And indeed his ‘spirit in Nature’, both before and after its final two-volume exposition, profoundly informs Andersen's writings – as must already be evident to the reader of this study: all those many literary syntheses of human, animal and plant life infused with emotions, very frequently articulated to mutual satisfactory comprehension.

Four days before Ørsted's death Andersen had lost another dear friend, the composer Hartmann's wife Emma.⁸³ Nor was this all:

At the very time of her mother's death, the youngest of the children, a little girl called Maria, suddenly fell ill. I have preserved some of her features in one of my fairy-tales, ‘The Old House’. It was this little girl who, as a child of two, always had to dance when she heard music or singing, must dance to it; and when she came into the room on a Sunday while her brothers and sisters were singing hymns, she would start dancing. But her sense for music would not allow her not to do what was correct, and so she automatically stood throughout each hymn, first on one leg and then on the other, involuntarily dancing to its rhythm.

In the house of her mother's death this little head bowed down, it was almost as though her mother had prayed to our Lord, ‘Let me take one of the children with me, the smallest, for she cannot do without me.’ And God heard her prayer.⁸⁴

The Denmark of the early 1850s was far nearer to the country later generations are familiar with – in its unifying values, in its priorities and social temperament – than that before 1848. And it is hard not to attribute this, to a very considerable extent, to the powerful figure of N.F.S. Grundtvig.⁸⁵ The Collins may have disliked him, Andersen been at times equivocal, but he still remains a pivotal member of the culture he helped to bring into coherent shape. His study of Nordic myth, his translation of myths into learned volumes and poems proved not just inspiriting but harmonising for Danes developing their national consciousness after years of difficulty. His view that the Bible possessed a spirit greater than its varying parts, together with his often-quoted dictum that people were human before they were Christians, helped create a non-divisive church for Denmark. He himself was a practical as well as a practising Christian, as pastor of the chapel of the Vartov Hospital from 1839 till his death in 1872. The achievement for which Europe has remembered – and even sought to emulate – him is the establishment of Folk High Schools, popular education to stimulate the mind and imagination of all, irrespective of background. (They were to take off in Sweden too.) Queen Caroline Amalie was an ardent supporter of this wide-scale project, and we would surely be right to see Andersen's own tales as an expression of the same endeavour, of the Danish folkelighed he sought to encourage.

Two fairy tales from the early 1850s seem to me worth examining more closely now: ‘“Alt paa sin rette Plads!”’ (‘“Everything in Its Right Place!”’, 1852)86 and ‘Nissen hos Spekhøkeren’ (‘The Goblin at the Grocer's’, 1852).⁸⁷

6

It was Just Mathias Thiele (1795–1874) who suggested that Andersen write a fairy tale about a whistle that could blow everything into its right place. ‘In these words lay the plot of the story and from that the fairy tale sprang.’ But what does ‘sin rette Plads’, ‘its right place’ really mean, and what constitutes ‘Alt’, ‘everything’? Changes cannot be made in one corner without radically, and visibly, affecting the whole vicinity. Andersen, in common with thinking people all over Europe from 1848 on, had been giving intense thought to this question. He would come to his conclusions by following through transpositions made via a fairy-tale conceit, and for his purposes would jettison the kind of chronology so dear to the social novel, now in thorough literary dominion. His brief tale, in contrast, leaps over blocks of years and spans more than a century, to end with a characteristic saw-like one-liner, half sending up the mental exercise in which the whole piece has engaged: ‘Evigheden er lang, længere end denne Historie.’⁸⁸ ‘Eternity is long, longer than this story.’ Also Andersen will employ magic with its own consistent laws to convey a universal truth more sharply than any plot device used in realist fiction could ever do.

A young tutor to a rich baronial family makes the operative whistle out of the branch of an old willow tree. He does so at the request of the boy who is his youngest charge, but also to please the baron's oldest daughter who loves the willow tree and cherishes stories of its history. Later there is a grand reception in the baronial household and the young man has no alternative but to play publicly on the whistle, even though he first declined to do so; a mocking young ‘Cavaleer’, in effect laughing at him because of his social position, was too insistent. But – ‘Det var en underlig Fløite! der lød en Tone, saa udholdende, som den klinger fra Damp-Locomotivet, ja meget stærkere’,⁸⁹ ‘It was an extraordinary flute! There issued a sound, so penetrating, as if it rang out from a steam-locomotive, yet much stronger.’

The simile is very much one of the Andersen of these years of change (‘Thousands of Years to Come’, with which our study opened, is this tale's contemporary); this magic whistle both resembles and outdoes the marvels of the day – resembles because we should never forget what ingenuities modern humankind is capable of, outdoes because there are forces greater even than science at play in our world. And these are what our flute is serving. As a result of the notes played on it, a storm wind arises, which cries out what it is about to effect: ‘Alt paa sin rette Plads!’90 ’Everything in its right place!’

The young baroness – who will be, with the tutor, one of the two chief beneficiaries of the whistle-blast – is the only person in all the ensuing repositioning – or is it restitution of rights? – to know enough not to be surprised by it. The history of the willow tree from which the flute was whittled has long seemed important to her, and it was with the most relevant part of this that the tale itself opened. These first pages show that Andersen had put neither the matter nor the moral questions of The Two Baronesses behind him. The willow tree in question – it hasn't been pruned so grows freely, and though twisted by a storm hosts many plants in the cleft in its trunk – is itself an offshoot of a larger willow tree that once grew beside the manor-house moat. Breaks or irregularities in genealogical lines are absolutely integral to this tale. This willow tree – known as ‘vort Stamtræ’,⁹¹ ‘our family tree’ – manifests both the importance and the unimportance of them.

More than a hundred years before there stood on the site of the family's present property an earlier manor house, an ancien régime establishment whose master lived in complete disregard of social classes other than his own – though in his work-free life he lived off their backs. Coming back from one of the hunting expeditions that fill his ample leisure time, he sees the estate's goose-girl – ‘Halv Barn var hun endnu’,⁹² ‘Half a child was she still’ – hurrying her flock over the moat-bridge to avoid the galloping horses. It amuses him to poke her in the chest with his whip, making her lose her balance, and to shout the story's motto at her, adding: ‘i Skarnet med Dig!’⁹³ ‘into the mud with you!’ (‘Skarnet’ could equally well be translated as ‘the shit’.) He laughs at his own crass humour, as do his sycophantic, wastrel companions. And into the mire the girl would have fallen had she not clutched the branch of the willow tree. But in doing so she causes it to snap off, and she would have fallen down into the moat had not a man who witnessed the whole ugly business given her a strong hand. He is a pedlar, a wandering stocking-seller, and he plants the broken willow branch in the ground, begging it to grow so a flute could be made from its wood. This could play a tune the lord of the manor and his friends would dance to. Shortly afterwards the pedlar himself suffers at their hands. Inside the manor house plying his wares, he is subject to more cruel practical jokes, forced to drink out of one of his stockings.

Leaving the manor, and likening it to Sodom and Gomorrah, he realises that it was no place for him. Literally true, ultimately untrue. For while the Baron and his friends – hell-raisers like the older Baroness's father-in-law and husband in Andersen's previous novel – drink and gamble their way into bankruptcy, the pedlar himself works hard and builds up enough trade to buy the property from them. As Andersen puts it: ‘Ærlighed og Driftighed, de give god Medbør, og nu var Hosekræmmeren Herre paa Gaarden.’94 ‘Honesty and enterprise, give good fair wind (i.e. prosperity), and now the pedlar was lord of the manor.’ The prevalent values of the nineteenth century have asserted themselves betimes, almost half a century before the French Revolution: thrifty, middle-class, evangelically disposed and hard working. These prevail over the unthinking acceptance of high rank and the consequent self-indulgent hedonism of so many members of the squirearchy. Appropriately the new-type squire, the pedlar-landowner, bans cards in his household, reminding us of Andersen's own strong anti-gambling stance.

He also takes himself a wife, and who else but the goose-girl with her undiminished sweetness of nature? She looks as beautiful in fine clothes as any young lady born into the upper classes. How did their fairy-tale-like union come about? Andersen, in complete mastery of his own matter and manner, verbally shrugs: too long to explain in such busy times as the present, and it isn't important to the story anyway. But he vividly conveys what is important: that under this pair the manor prospers very thoroughly. Wealth produces more wealth, particularly if the homestead itself is well cared for, the land husbanded, the house always orderly and clean, the mistress spinning with her maids in the long winter evenings, and the master – who rises to the rank of Justitsraad, Privy Councillor – reading aloud from the Bible every Sunday evening.

We now move on a hundred years, and the carefully loaded descriptions of what has replaced the manor and moat that the pedlar bought up – alongside the strange events that cause such upheavals in them – amount to a miracle of condensed social history. As in ‘The Old House’, a new edifice has gone up on the estate of the old manor, standing on an eminence, proudly modern and with glass windows of such transparency it looks as if there are no panes in them at all. The house is grander as well as smarter than its predecessor, far more comfortable, far fuller of luxuries, and the garden is correspondingly much more orderly, even to the point of being rather manicured-looking, with its smooth-cut lawns, and trellised roses above the front steps. Its owners are evidently rich people, and titled ones too, so can they really be descendants of a resourceful erstwhile pedlar and his goose-girl wife?

Certainly their portraits – an obviously eighteenth-century man with a powdered wig and his obviously eighteenth-century wife with powdered hair – have been relegated to the passageway in the servants' hall where present-day little barons have been amusing themselves shooting arrows at them. The pictures themselves, unlike so many others in the house, are surely worthless junk, and their subjects, so unlike their own papa and mamma, aren't really members of the family; how could they be when he sold wares and she kept geese? Yet they are their own great-grandmother and great-grandfather.

It is clear that this establishment stands at far more of a tangent to the countryside than either the original old manor or the manor when the pedlar and his wife developed it. This is an urban, indeed urbane atmosphere; new money – trade, banking – has obviously gone into the place's design and upkeep. The titles of its owners have probably been purchased, or as good as this. The omnipresent baronial atmosphere extends not only to the resident family themselves but to their many guests and employees. This is nowhere more apparent than at a ball and concert they hold. Clergymen sit modestly in a corner and the clergyman's son who is the young tutor, enamoured of the young baroness, even speaks – a bit pompously and sycophantically – of the beauty of true nobility, of how wrong those social critics are who deny the aristocracy its proper merits, though he hasn't a drop of blue blood himself.

And then he plays the flute, and the forceful wind starts to blow. ‘Everything in its right place!’ is the order, and the snooty young gentleman who insisted on the tutor playing the flute finds himself, with not a few of his friends, flying head over heels into the chicken-house. Papa, the Baron is blown into the shepherd's cottage, and the shepherd himself is promoted to the servants' hall. Some of the noble guests unconsciously prove their nobility by remaining in place, while the flautist and the young baroness go to the top of the great dining table. They are in love, and where love is, nobility is, as the pedlar and the goose-girl once proved.

Is it an improved, an egalitarian or Grundtvigian society Andersen is presenting to us now? Not exactly, because after everything the different stations remain in place: it is their occupants who are changed round. And we know Andersen to have been far from averse to some of the things that go with nobility – refinement, cultivation of conversation and interests that exceed the utilitarian and are carried out for their own sake. Nevertheless, the very transportations have their own point to make. Absolutely nobody has the right to take their own rank, let alone their right to it, for granted. And when they contemplate it, they should remember the less fortunate, the victimised salesman, the abused servant-girl.

‘The Goblin at the Grocer's’ is a delightful jeu d'esprit, but serious enough, and the one-liner saying at its end presents a quite undeniable truth about our lives. A ‘Nisse’,95 or goblin, widespread in Scandinavia, has his equivalent in British folklore: he is the hob or lob who does helpful work about the house and garden in exchange for a dish of food (porridge more often than not) left out for him by the householders. And it is porridge – with a large pat of butter floating in the middle – which Andersen's goblin receives from the grocer with whom he makes his home. A student lives in the house too, up in the attic. He buys his provisions from the grocer, coming in the back door to do so. But one day he is so intrigued by a leaf from a poetry book he spies at the base of one of the grocery casks that he asks to have the whole book instead of his usual cheese. For the student, poor and unimportant though he is, passionately loves poetry, and when the goblin creeps up to his garret, he sees him engrossed in the torn pages the grocer has given him. Reminding us of ‘The Shadow’ and the apartment across the way where ‘Poesie’ dwelled, the goblin now sees the dreary little upstairs room transformed by emanations from the poetry book: a great tree springs up with green leaves and blossom, and each blossom is a beautiful girl's head. No wonder the goblin likes being in the student's quarters. And yet – the dull, incontestable fact remains: the student has no porridge. And hasn't he himself to be where the food is? Yes, but even so his total satisfaction with the main part of the grocer's house diminishes after his glimpse of the Poesie-filled room.

One night the goblin wakes up to hear appalling sounds: a fire has broken out, and the grocer's household must be evacuated. Everybody wants to save the possession dearest to him/herself. The goblin leaps up the stairs to the student's attic, and finds him standing quietly by the window gazing at the conflagration. It is the goblin who seizes the poetry book and takes it to rooftop safety. As he sits there, reading it himself in the glare of the street fire, he realises that he shares the student's priorities, that poetry is what he himself cares for most. And then he thinks of the part of the grocer in his life:

‘Jeg vil dele mig imellem dem!’ sagde han, ‘jeg kan ikke reent slippe Spekhøkeren for Grødens Skyld!’

Og det var ganske menneskeligt! – Vi andre gaae ogsaa til Spekhøkeren for Grøden.96

‘I will divide myself between them!’ said he, ‘I can't completely let go of the grocer because of the porridge!’

And that was perfectly human! – We others also go to the grocer's because of the porridge.

This beautifully crystallises the basic nineteenth-century tussle between material need and spirituality, between commercialism and culture. It is even a pointer towards the Wilcox–Schlegel dichotomy of E.M. Forster's Howards End (1910).

But Andersen's most considerable imaginative undertaking of the mid–1850s was the novel ‘At være eller ikke være’ (‘To Be or Not To Be’). He began preparations for it in November/December 1855, and the book came out – simultaneously in Danish, German and English – in May 1957. It is a remarkable and too little known work.

7

Before the Jutland clergyman, Japetus Mollerup sets out on his first visit to Copenhagen in thirty years, his daughter begs him to bring her a good book, while his wife requests as her present a bad boy – ‘en slem Dreng’97 – out of whom she can make a good Christian. Japetus does indeed return from the capital with a boy – Niels Bryde, the novel's protagonist – and though he cannot be described as ‘bad’, he exhibits enough wilfulness to distress this God-fearing couple. Chief among these is his inability to accept Christianity as a matter of faith. Instead he moves through religious doubt into science-based atheism, and this despite following Japetus's example and studying for the ministry. Increasing alienation from his adoptive parents culminates in a twelve-year period of never seeing them at all. Yet at the end of the novel Niels returns to the Jutland parish for their diamond wedding, and finds himself, in the depth of his soul, reciting ‘Fader vor’,⁹⁸ ‘Our Father’. After so long a time – which includes the terrible 1848–50 War – the prayer of the clergyman's wife has been answered.

The scheme of the book will already be clear: Niels, orphaned at age eleven, is fortunate enough to be taken into a good, Christian home but, resisting its tenets to the point of renunciation, he knows true homecoming, spiritual as well as literal, only in maturity. By this time, thanks to the hard lessons of experience, he has overcome stumbling-blocks to the quietude of genuine belief. The trajectory of his life thus partakes of the closing of a circle.

That this is the novel's underlying design is apparent when we compare a salient early passage about Niels as a child with one near the close. In Niels's early years the two books most important to him were the Bible and the Thousand and One Nights, just as they had been for Andersen himself. The stories in both compendia shed light on existence for him. Aladdin in particular has such appeal for Niels that, even later on in life, he sees as significant a childhood dream in which he emulated him:

Han drømte nemlig en Nat, at han som Aladdin steeg ned i Hulen, hvor tusinde Skatte og skinnende Frugter næsten blændede ham; men han fandt og fik den forunderlige Lampe, og da han kom hjem med den, var det – hans Moders gamle Bibel.⁹⁹

He dreamed namely one night, that like Aladdin he descended into a cave, where a thousand treasures and shining fruits nearly blinded him; but he found and took the wonderful lamp, and when he came back home with it, it was – his mother's old Bible.

And in the final chapter – actually entitled ‘Den nye Aladdin’, ‘The New Aladdin’ – we revisit this dream with him. Niels has been moved by his reunion with Jutland folk of his past, all showing their age now, and thinks also of those he has lost during the course of his life: his blood parents, the Jewish girl, Esther, whom he had come to love. Pain and death are inseparable from existence and should be our chief instructors, a truth which makes him recall his long-ago dream of going down into the cave, picking up Aladdin's wonderful lamp and discovering later that it was his mother's old bible. But his reflections don't end there:

Ja, tilvisse! som en ny Aladdin var han steget ned i Videnskabens Hule, for mellem dens vidunderlige Frugter at finde Livets Lampe, og han holdt – sin Moders gamle Bibel, ikke dens Legem, men dens guddommelige Sjæl.100

Yes, indeed! Like a new Aladdin he had descended into the cave of science, in order to find among its wonderful fruits the lamp of life, and he held – his mother's old bible, not its body, but its divine spirit.

Enough has been said already of the imaginative importance of Aladdin to the Danish psyche, and of its personal meaning for Andersen himself. Didn't he write in his diary for Christmas 1825 when staying with the Wulffs: ‘Oh, what hasn't God done for me! It is going for me as it did for Aladdin…’?¹⁰¹ But he can now see himself as ‘a new Aladdin’. He has in recent years climbed down into the cave not for precious minerals to make him rich (the normal reading of the Arabian Nights tale, for doesn't every hero, especially one of humble provenance, want to end up prosperous?) rather in the hope of finding among the fascinating discoveries of science the very key to the mystery of existence. Out in the light of common day, of reviewed empirical experience, these turn out to be part of the lessons of the Bible.

But we note it isn't the Bible tout court, as in his original dream. The new Aladdin's lamp is not a literal book but the spirit immanent in it. Readers know now just how much of time and energy Niels has spent on rigorous current German biblical scholarship. Yet just as scientific discoveries cannot diminish his faith, but are splendid complements to it, neither can this Higher Criticism of Holy Writ. The Bible can now be seen – as many Grundtvigians did indeed see it – as an imperfect vehicle for perfect truths, however full the text might be of impurities and inconsistencies; as a repository of matchless moral and spiritual truths, humankind's strongest illuminator. Niels, newly appreciating all this, stands not just for Andersen – whom he resembles far less closely than any of the heroes of his other novels – but for every thinking Dane of the times.

Importantly, the new Aladdin we salute on departure is an adult, not just a resourceful youth; he has the right to think of himself as a member of a sore-tested but successful new country. He has not only come through the appalling trials of the Three Years War but has acquitted himself well in it, experiencing its tragedies and its victories at first hand and personally contributing to relieving its pains and sorrows. Niels is admiringly cognisant of recent achievements in science and learning – in Denmark and elsewhere, perhaps in the German lands most of all – and is prepared to build on them. But equally he wants to be at one with the country's longest-held creed, Christianity, which has undergone civilised evolution until it can now be viewed in its essence: the core teachings of its founder.

In the new Constitution of 1849102 – probably through the exertions of Grundtvig himself – the exact position of the State Church was not rigidly defined. As a result it was able to accommodate – like another state Protestant organisation, the Church of England – a diversity of religious opinions and to be respected for its social role by those unable to accept traditional Christianity at all. Thus – though there are some less than complimentary remarks about Grundtvigianism in the novel – Niels, back at home with a pastor foster-father he once found too narrowly doctrinaire, can feel part of this man's family (he has a devout daughter, Bodil), even of his flock, with no sense of psychological or intellectual strain. Or so we are asked to believe. The novel doesn't show us Niels after these moments of spiritual reconciliation.

‘To Be or Not To Be’ then gives us a threefold Aladdin's journey, rewarded by reunion with the loving guardians of a Weltanschauung once spurned. Andersen spoke of his immense labours on the novel, and truly the territory covered, societal, geographical, emotional, intellectual, historical, must have made enormous demands on him (though it is hard not to detect a certain hastiness in the last chapters). But both at the time and subsequently it has not been one of Andersen's most admired – let alone loved – productions, something easily enough accounted for. The task of presenting religious doubt and its resolution in a narrative that also strives to bring to life individuals in a specific society is a hard one, and the novel – like The Two Baronesses – suffers as a result from an imbalance of attention. As a serious man of his day Andersen was interested in, maybe even knowledgeable about, the religious controversies preoccupying so many. But they did not enter the creative components of his mind; he was respectful of theses and disputes, but not mentally at ease with them. Earnest respectful endeavour replaces imaginative engagement, and this is why even those critics and biographers well-disposed to Andersen as a novelist, Bredsdorff or Jens Andersen, have paid the book comparatively little attention. Before a closer examination, then, why not cite those merits it possesses, for all its undoubted unevenness, over its predecessors? They are, in this critic's view, far from inconsiderable.

In Niels Bryde, Andersen has created a male character with little obvious resemblance to himself, while not being in any way a compensatory stand-in. His maleness is not just firmer than that of his counterparts in the other novels, it comes across as something we don't question. And it reveals and exercises itself, both interestingly and credibly, in action within the public arena, without shirking the challenge of combat. Niels is intelligent, with a questioning intellect never lightly satisfied, and is therefore eminently representative of that egregiously questioning European generation which participated in – or at least found sympathetic – the upheavals of 1848. He is also – which helps us to accept him in sociological and historical terms – quite blessedly free from shoots of genius: the improvisational gifts of Antonio, the wayward Byronic temperament of Otto Thostrup (though he, a fellow Jutlander, is the hero to whom Niels is closest), the thwarted musical talents of Christian in Only a Fiddler, or even the rare literary powers of Elisabeth the younger Baroness – to say nothing of the spectacular capacities of the prodigy Peer in Andersen's last novel of all.

Allied to this is another welcome absence in the novel – that of excursions into high society, and likewise of protectors/patrons of dazzling eminence to whom gratitude must constantly be expressed. You could argue that, together with ‘Everything in its Right Place’, no work of Andersen's displays the post-Constitution, Grundtvigian folkelighed of Denmark more than ‘To Be or Not To Be’. Niels comes from good working-class stock, his saviour Japetus Mollerup is an ordinary enough clergyman (and, paradoxically, the more credible as an idiosyncratic individual for being this), of no social consequence outside his remote Jutland area. The Jewish Arons family are drawn with a confidence and verisimilitude (for all the ideational matter foisted on them, especially the daughter, Esther) that allows us to see them as likely inhabitants of a real Copenhagen. It is as if Andersen – having shed his authorial self of the type of obeisance to grandees that dominated his social calendar – felt at liberty to exercise that natural sharpness of observation and psychological assessment we encounter in his diaries. The characterisation here of Herr Svane, the perennial student who is Japetus's friend and Niels's godfather, or of Julius Arons, the spoilt son of an affluent father (his background consequently moving us the more keenly when he fights in the war – and loses his life) illustrates Andersen's truth-telling shrewdness superbly.

Then this fifth novel develops more fully and impressively what we have already admired in key sections of the earlier fiction: Andersen's ability to understand and bring to life the ways of a nameable community, with its particularities of belief, custom and conduct. He knew Jutland and its Silkenborg area more intimately than he obviously did the Campagna (The Improvisatore) or the Halligen islands (The Two Baronesses), which explains the greater solidity here of both landscape and the characters who arise out of it. And they are rendered without the hovering clouds over them of private, still-resented distress which at times obfuscate comparable scene-painting in O.T. and Only a Fiddler. Perhaps this should be attributed to Niels's moving through places as a full specimen of male humanity, not as an androgynous being, a marsh-plant on legs.

In the book's first chapter Japetus Mollerup goes back to his old Copenhagen college, Regentsen. Its caretaker, Poul is also janitor of the adjacent observatory with its Round Tower, where he lives with his son Niels. At the reunion party held for Japetus, Herr Svane introduces him to his godson; this is Niels, clearly a great favourite with the whole company, ‘livlig og opvakt’,103 ‘lively and quick-witted’, with ‘Læselyst’, ‘a passion for reading’, qualities that will never forsake him. Herr Svane suggests that the following day the boy should show Japetus the way to his own apartment; when he fails to turn up to do so, this seems greatly out of character. The two men soon find out the reason; Niels bursts in on the two of them and tells them his father has just been killed.

Poul had gone out into the city streets earlier that morning on a shopping errand, undecided whether he should turn first to the right or to the left to discharge it. After a moment's deliberation he went left, and almost as soon as he did so, a window crashed down on top of him from the third storey of a building. It didn't kill him outright, but he died shortly after his arrival in hospital. This abrupt and strange happening accords with Andersen's constant preoccupation with the relationship between blind (or seemingly blind) chance and the Christian God's foreknowledge and will.

Finding out that Poul was a widower and that his son has no living relations, Japetus – remembering his wife's request – decides to take him to Jutland and give him a home. Up until the previous day Niels and he had no knowledge whatsoever of each other's existence, and the whole episode is surely a correlative for the mystery of how we are placed in life as we are. It too is a matter of chance. Niels – who will share some of his foster-father's intellectual interests – is no more like or unlike Japetus than many a son is like or unlike his true father; than, say, Hans Christian Andersen, that epitome of motivation and unswerving concentration on self-imposed tasks, was to Hans Andersen.

Herr Svane – who will appear and reappear as a kind of wayward guardian angel of Niels (he has a certain resemblance to the peripatetic musical Kammerjunker in The Two Baronesses) – is sure that the right decision for both parties is being made when Japetus takes Niels with him. But is he ‘bad’ enough to meet Japetus's wife's requirement? Herr Svane assures him: ‘“Drengen er hæderlig – og Trold er der i ham”’,104 ‘“The lad is honest – and there is [a] troll in him.”’ Certainly both halves of this statement are true – but in a novel with frank theological concerns it is difficult to know quite how we should take this last sentence. If we are to infer from it that Niels is no freer from original sin than any other human, and that this will manifest itself (and by no means always to old Japetus's liking), well and good. But if we are to see this troll as representative of Niels's propensity to evil, only routed by his saving return to the Church, then it holds up less well. In truth Andersen's inclination was to take a psychological, inclusive attitude to behaviour, however disagreeable, especially a child's or young person's. And this is what we find in the case of Niels Bryde, even taking into account certain darker aspects of his behaviour.

After this first chapter bringing foster-father and -son together, we travel back in time for a brief overview of Niels's young life to date: ‘Rundetaarn’,¹⁰⁵ ‘Round Tower’, the pages, like the years they deal with, take colour from the remarkable structure after which the second chapter is named. Built to cater for the scientific needs of Denmark's greatest son (in Andersen's estimation), Tycho Brahe, the tower enjoys spectacular views of Copenhagen, of its historic sites and its contemporary bustle alike. A feat of architecture and engineering, and a dramatic, stalwart landmark, it is often alarmingly at the mercy of the elements, regularly battered by mighty winds. And, to suit Brahe, it stretches up towards the heavens, the night patterns of which so intrigue little Niels. Though characteristic enough of Andersen's predilections in life and literature, this chapter suggests – as does the whole boyhood sequence following it – the influence on him of David Copperfield, revealed in manner as well as matter, making the relationship between Andersen and the great English novel, when viewed with hindsight as a whole, one of give-and-take. Consider the details Andersen gives us of Niels's imaginative life. … Until Godfather Svane puts him right, he believes the dark spots on the moon are all you can see of a man who stole cabbages and was then placed right up there so all the world below could view him. Couldn't Dickens's David have entertained a similar mythopoeic fancy? And when we move on to Chapter 3 and Niels's arrival at Hvidingedalsbanker, near Silkeborg in Jutland, there is more than a little of the excited, bewildered, ever-curious response of David to Yarmouth when he makes his (temporary) home with the Peggottys. Musician Grethe, the old tailor with his fanatical, self-destructive honesty, the gypsy woman with her special magical tree and her deformed baby, all these come across charged with the mystery that the impressionable Niels instinctually imposes on their existences.

No episodes bring Niels more fully to life or show us Andersen's kinship with Dickens as a recorder of a boy's complex, unpredictable passionate life better than those concerning a cat and (further into the novel) a dog.

Niels is allowed to choose a kitten from the litter of a favourite cat of the manse, and he delights in watching its antics, seeing it play with a brass button like a child with a toy. Then a little gold-and-silver vinaigrette goes missing. The pastor's wife, knowing all other persons near the object would be completely innocent of theft, thinks Niels is the culprit. He is not, and is both hurt and enraged by the very notion that he could be suspected. Obviously – as far as readers are concerned, though Andersen is too subtle to state it – his still fragile sense of security as an adopted boy is threatened. If others cannot see what kind of person he is, someone who would never steal anything and never tell a lie, what hope can there be for him of ever belonging here?

And then the thief is revealed. It is the little cat which, having taken a fancy to the brightness of the vinaigrette, had rolled it into a hole in the skirting-board. Niels, who has been feeling like a pariah, is suddenly seized with blind rage, picks up the kitten and hurls the poor creature against the kitchen stove. This injures the cat so severely that it has to be put down. Of course Niels is appalled by his own action, and the emotional fit in which he performed it makes him feel as though – says Andersen – he has committed the crime of Cain. But it tells us that Herr Svane was not wrong in his remarks to Japetus: there is a troll somewhere in Niels; his is a fierce, not an easy-going, adaptable nature, and may well get him – and others too – into trouble. All the same he is sufficiently alarmed by what he has done to watch himself more closely thereafter. What Andersen does not state – but surely intends us to infer – is the limitations of vision of what Burns would have called the ‘unco’ guid’, of the pastor and his wife. Their very virtue makes them see vice too readily, and Niels, innocent of the crime they accused him of, accordingly went on to perpetrate a far worse one.

Niels's impetuosity – this time working for good – is shown in his relation to his dog. One of his own attributes that Andersen did bestow on the young Niels was terror of dogs; he will go any length to avoid them. However in Jutland he soon takes to the manse's beloved watchdog, and his fear leaves him so completely that, when he is in Copenhagen, he acquires a puppy he calls Hvaps (a play on the word ‘Hvalp’, ‘whelp’). This dog becomes his dearest companion. Returning with him to Jutland on the ferry, the dog falls overboard. Niels implores the captain to stop the boat, otherwise Hvaps will be drowned. The captain refuses – to stop a boat for the sake of a dog? But you would stop it for the sake of a man, retorts Niels, and jumps overboard himself, to rescue the animal. Later in their lives, when Niels lies wounded and semi-conscious on the battlefield where he has been serving as a medic, it is Hvaps who finds him and is responsible for his survival, a beautiful, haunting scene.

David Copperfield is also an apt point of comparison in an unfortunate sense, since, just as the vitality in the English novel ebbs after the hero's young boyhood, so here; after the vivid chapters of Niels's Jutland years – taking him to the age of eighteen – the novel loses focus and therefore intensity. It remains, though, always worthy of attention, and in the account of Niels's experiences as an army surgeon in the war shows aspects of Andersen's mind and art which may well have taken critics by surprise. But Niels as a social animal in Copenhagen does not greatly interest us; indeed he interests us far less than the not dissimilarly placed Otto in O.T., and for two reasons.

If Niels has a masculinity more acceptable, more recognisable by conventional criteria than Andersen's other heroes, this does not take a sexual form. He is a keen sportsman, liking to go out with a gun on the Jutland heath, he has a taste for dialectical argument in which he can more than hold his own. But to passion he is a declared stranger; he is a cerebral, hard-working intellectual with no time for the erotic; he has the opportunity to visit the dance halls of Hamburg but they don't appeal to him. Though he has a circle of friends, he is not preoccupied by comradeship – even with Julius – as Andersen's other young men are. All this means that, after his boyhood, he is difficult either to identify with or even properly to see and hear. And when we are asked to believe in his late love for Esther – who has largely represented opposite points of view to his during their seemingly interminable discussions on religion – we cannot really comply. Esther is a concept rather than a character, as, we rather feel she was to Niels himself. However, we have to add to this criticism the literary success of the account of her death in the terrible cholera epidemic of 1853. Perhaps this gains in effect because the author makes us understand that, tragically, she is but one of many whose sufferings Niels unflaggingly confronts as a doctor.

Religious debates being so heatedly to the fore in the Europe of the 1840s and '50s, nothing is more believable than Niels's intent wish to come to grips with them, and, especially as he is actually reading for the ministry, absorbing current ideas to the point of (temporary) discipleship. Those of two in particular engage him: David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74)106 and L. Feuerbach (1804–72).¹⁰⁷ For a while Niels resists reading Strauss, until fellow students tell him Das Leben Jesu (1835–36) is an indispensable work, and then he does apply his mind to it. It would have been an irresponsible budding theologian of the 1840s who did not feel obliged to do so; Niels feels he almost becomes this book, which uses a historian and a textual critic's exacting methods to examine the Gospel accounts of Jesus. (George Eliot translated it into English from the German in 1846.) Andersen himself, moved by his own father's utterances that Jesus may well have been a man like any other, if an inspired man, repeatedly held and expressed – sometimes to the annoyance and distress of acquaintances – essentially Unitarian views (which were also those of Charles Dickens). He can have been neither astonished nor shocked by Das Leben Jesu, unlike old Japetus, who is both. Feuerbach is an altogether more revolutionary spirit (in more ways than one; he was influential in the events of 1848 and importantly on Karl Marx himself, despite his turning his critical apparatus on him), and Andersen – perhaps to give his words more authority, perhaps simply to insulate them – includes a quotation from him in the thinker's original German. For Feuerbach – as is pithily clear in these incorporated sentences – Christianity (indeed God himself) was a construct of the human mind devised to answer deep emotional and intellectual needs. Theology should therefore be considered anthropologically; we should seek to determine what these components of human nature and experience are that it is attempting to administer to, and analyse accordingly. The true trinity was that which existed within the human being: reason, love and will. Immortality was not to be thought of: indeed his first major book, written only in his twenties, took the form of a fierce attack on the very concept of it: Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (Thoughts on Death and Immortality, 1830). One wonders how Andersen of all people would have reacted to one of its most quoted epigrams: ‘Man is a cobbler, and the earth is his last’. In Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity, 1841) Feuerbach proclaimed God a human creation, and Christianity a myth designed to gratify humankind's longing for perfection. Impassioned pages of ‘To Be or Not To Be’ supply a heartfelt rejection of Feuerbach's own rejection – of life after death.

Unless the protagonist is someone of extremely strong and unusual personality who can convert ideas into arresting yet representative actions, like Ivan or Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoevsky – or, dare one say it, since it is his soliloquy that provides the book's title and numerous points of reference: Hamlet? – the battle between ideas and flesh-and-blood humans to engage writers' and readers' attention in a form as earth-bound as the nineteenth-century novel is a most unequal one. And Niels, externally, behaviourally so lively, appears inwardly rather a blotting-pad. He has nothing of his own to contribute to the arguments he instigates, and how indeed could he have? He is no Feuerbach. To us – especially when confronting Esther as she passes from Judaism into Christianity – he seems merely to be going through set paces. What one has to term the philosophical aspect of the book is interesting primarily for what it tells us about both Andersen and Danish society in context.

Jens Andersen in his biography makes an interesting case for the novel being in certain respects a posthumous and eminently respectful dissociation, if not precisely from Ørsted himself, then from the ideas expounded in his influential book, The Spirit in Nature.108 Certainly we are led to perceive that Niels's awed study of anatomy and of the power of electricity, far from confirming the theism of Andersen's mentor, sets him on the dangerous course of Feuerbach-like denials of a supreme force external to the monde visible, one not merely responsible for the enthralling complexities of Earth's micro-societies (inside the human body, inside a mere drop of water) but capable of loving absorption of the individual into Life Everlasting. For, if you conflate the world of physics and the world of spiritual inquiry too thoroughly might you not conclude terrifyingly and – for Andersen – insupportably, as Niels comes for a while to do, that with annihilation of the brain, the soul too is extinguished?

Though Andersen claims in his autobiography that he and Kierkegaard (who died in 1855) had become, after their much-trumpeted hostilities, civil, even friendly to one another,109 and though there is some evidence to support the fact that socially they could meet without embarrassment and with a show of friendliness, we can find in the novel only ambiguous regard at best for Denmark's most controversial, indeed notorious theologian, for his desire that Christianity be individually experienced as existential truth. Esther, the questing Jew, who becomes, for an important later section of the novel, Christianity's greatest apologist, does not care for his works – unlike all those Danish society women, says Andersen, who claim to understand him. His writings are described as ‘dette Humorets og Forstandens Drypsteens-Væld’,¹¹⁰ ‘this collection of stalactites of humour and reason’, an implication (I take it!) that aphoristic brilliance is too big a part of them, and that ironically they lead back to ‘orthodoxe, gothiske Kirkebue’,¹¹¹ ‘orthodox, Gothic church arches’, away from the hurly-burly of quotidian nineteenth-century life. (Considering Kierkegaard's inestimable influence on twentieth-century thought, Esther's evaluation – which is presumably Andersen's own – seems rather wide of the mark, to say the least, but that is not our concern here.)

There are some references to Grundtvig in the novel that are not precisely complimentary. Niels is unconvinced by his ‘Edda-Christianity’, that is, Grundtvig's determination to see the whole line of pre-Christian myth, especially the Nordic, as though it were divinely approved route to Christianity. As we will find in one of his most ambitious tales, ‘Dyndkongens Datter’ (The ‘Marsh King's Daughter’, 1858)¹¹² and in his story/essay ‘Det ny Aarhundredes Musa’ (‘The New Century's Muse’, 1861),¹¹³ Andersen became ever more morally apprehensive of too much reverence for civilisations outside the Graeco-Roman, Judaeo-Christian aegis. Perhaps a more telling qualification of admiration for Grundtvig comes in the scene where Niels, as surgeon, is quartered in the house in Schleswig of a strongly anti-Danish, pro-German young woman, Hibernia, with whom he argues. He concedes that Grundtvig, with his articulated patriotism and war songs the greatest champion of the Danish cause, is perhaps letting himself be carried away by partisan fervour. Perhaps he should fight a duel with his German counterpart while the rest of the population – Danes, Germans and Schleswig-Holsteiners of both denominations – attended to the matter of just getting on with one another.

But this apart – Niels is joking here but pleased to be doing so – ‘To Be or Not To Be’ seems impregnated with the essentials of Grundtvigianism, even if it is never acknowledged as such. Instead of a mystic fusion of science, poetry and theology à la Ørsted, instead of arrival at a Christian faith through an intellectual assault on its cardinal documents (German scholars still within the Christian fold), we come to a kindly symbiosis of intellectual pursuit and quiet conviction, of acceptance of the past and energetic application to the present, of belief in the importance of the individual soul and a loving commitment to other people and to the best forms of society for them to flourish in. The novel's deeply felt evocation of gypsy life and religion, the solemnity with which the gypsy woman's magic tree, Ma Krokone, is presented, further exhibit a positively Grundtvigian inclusiveness of approach to differing cultures and faiths.

The proof of Andersen's own concordance with all this is the novel's marvellous war sequence, which, together with the childhood chapters, provide the best reason for a restitution of ‘To Be or Not To Be’ in the Andersen canon. For its peers we have to turn to the Thackeray of Vanity Fair (1847–48)114 or the Stendhal of The Charterhouse of Parma (1839),¹¹⁵ while reminding ourselves that Andersen is not recreating a war from annals and reminiscences of the elderly but from the still raw experiences of combatants and from his own impressions. And it is warfare at its most uncompromisingly modern.

Niels has changed his studies from theology to medicine, and, virtually at the outbreak of the Schleswig-Holstein war, enlists as assistant surgeon in the regiment that his friend Julius Arons has joined. Julius's conduct here carries complete conviction; long bored by his rich-boy dissipations, he now discovers as a non-commissioned officer an energy in himself that had hitherto been only latent. Danish victory at Bov (9 April 1848) raises spirits generally, but Julius and Niels then move on to Schleswig the city, which the Prussian General Wrangel has been ordered to occupy. After nine hours of intense fighting the Danes are unable to take it from the Prussians (23 April) but Niels has remained on the outskirts of the town and so is able to answer a call to go on to Isted (later the scene of a major Danish triumph). There he has to work with the wounded until he all but drops – the sense of exhaustion is conveyed in Andersen's most kinaesthetic manner – and he has to be roused by mates from the deep sleep into which he falls. Next he makes his way towards the Danish headquarters established on the island of Als. As the enemy army advances into Jutland, the blaze of its fires can be seen all the way over to Fyn. At this difficult, dispiriting period of the war, Niels goes over to Augustenborg to see Julius Arons who is dying from typhus, these soldiers' scourge. Julius asks Niels whether he believes life awaits him after this war, and Niels, to his own surprise, cannot bring himself to give a negative reply. But he knows, only too well as he watches the death throes, that this is the one he makes in his heart.

Weeks pass. Andersen warns us that he is not offering a history of the Schleswig-Holstein war, just a picture of its effect on an individual mind. But with a lively insistence he makes us appreciate the movements of the Danes just before the encounters at Sundeved and Nybøl (28 May) that marked the turning-point and culminated in the victory of Dybbøl Mølle. It is almost midnight on 28 May when Niels, standing on the wall while working with the hospital vans, suddenly experiences a stab of pain, like a hornet's sting, and all goes black. When he comes to – and this with incomplete consciousness – he is lying in a ditch, ‘i Overgang til Ting’,116 ‘in transition to [being] a thing’, as his progressive student self would have said. But he is aware of something in him demanding that this does not happen. He is also aware to an acute degree of his surroundings, the damp grass, the moonlight, a horse dying from war wounds nearby. And his mind continues to play on the difficulties of ascribing spirituality to a failing body such as his own now, the mortality of which will surely shortly be proved.

Just as he is giving himself up to nothingness, he is aware of movement close to him, of two eyes gazing down at him. These eyes belong to Hvaps, his dear dog, who has been looking for him and now has found him, out of love, and now in that love is offering him comfort. The beautiful lines that come next suggest – to me very strongly – that Andersen's now stated belief in the soul, in virtuous forces that can transport us beyond death, does not confine itself to humans:

Hunden kom til ham-! var dette kun Instinct? Var dette kun Hjernens Function, Nervernes og Blodets Bevægelse, der førte til denne Slutning og Handling, eller var der noget Høiere, og skulde Dyret her, imellem Liv og Tilintetgjørelse forkynde ham det?¹¹⁷

The dog came to him! Was this only instinct? Was this only the function of the brain, the movement of the nerves and the blood, which led to this end and action, or was there something higher, and would the animal here, proclaim it to him between life and extinction?

And this is what Hvaps surely does, for two paragraphs later we read of Niels:

Han laae stille, udstrakt; hans Hund sad klynkende ved hans Hoved, og klart skinnede Maanen hen over Valpladsen, det store Blad med Døds-Hieroglypher, der gjemte Nøglen til Spørgsmaalet:

‘At være eller ikke være!’¹¹⁸

He lay still, outstretched: his dog sat whimpering by his head, and the moon shone clear over the battlefield, that great page with death's hieroglyphics, which hide the key to the question:

‘To be or not to be!’

It is, of course, Hvap's sounds that draw passing soldiers to Niels, who rescue him so that, in a literal sense, he is rather than is not. But spiritually too he has passed from the negative stage which has occupied so many youthful years to one of affirmation that he is the possessor of an eternal soul.

8

‘To Be or Not To Be’ was dedicated to Charles Dickens, and at the very time of its reception in Britain, Andersen was – after a ten-year gap and a warmly pressing invitation – the guest of the dedicatee, staying at Dickens's country home near Rochester, Kent: Gad's Hill (‘This is the exact spot Shakespeare used as a setting for Henry IV [Part 2]’).119 On 28 June 1857 Andersen, alone with Mrs Dickens (Catherine) and the children, was writing in his diary:

Slept restlessly, dreaming. The review in The Athenaeum lay upon my heart like a vampire. I'm still sitting this morning heavy at heart. – Letter from Mrs Scavenius. Today in The Examiner another not so very good review of To Be. They don't seem to have understood the book. I'm not content, cannot be so and feel myself a stranger among strangers. If only Dickens were here! – To exist without being able to express oneself, always fixing one's thoughts on the same dark point without being able to erase it. Lord God, it must be Thy will that I endure this! – Let me bear in mind that I must be friendly and kind to strangers. The forsaken are sent to me by God so that when we meet I can try to help them forget it's an alien land they're in, a language foreign to me they speak. Lord, teach me to be as Thou art – loving. After lunch I talked to Mrs Dickens about my mood. She read the two newspapers, said it was ‘stupid’ and that her husband never read what the papers said about him. (‘Without his knowledge or consent, M. Andersen may deceive some young intelligence, some susceptible heart. In one word, the book is dangerous.’) When Dickens came home, he heard about it from his wife and said at the dinner table: ‘You should never read anything in the newspapers except what you yourself have written; I haven't read criticism of me in twenty-four years!’ – He had brought along with him a Mr Shirley Brooks, one of the foremost contributors to Punch, the one who had produced that article about me. Later Dickens put his arms around me, saying, ‘Don't ever let yourself be upset by the newspapers; they're forgotten in a week and your book will live on! God has given you so very much; follow your own lead and give what you have in you; go your own way; you're above all those petty things!’ – And when we were walking on the road, he wrote with his foot in the sand. ‘That's criticism,’ he said and rubbed it out, ‘and it's gone just like that!’ – ‘A work which is good survives on its own merits. You've experienced it before; see what the verdict is.’ We lay by the monument all evening. A mist was rising from the sea; the sun shone in the windows in Rochester. We drank mixed wine up there. Later there was lightning. – The visitor gave me two issues of The Times from a long time ago. When I went to bed, Dickens said he hoped everything had now been forgotten and that I would sleep well. When I was asked at dinner how long I was staying in England, I answered, ‘Long for Mr Dickens, short for me!’120

Among other things this entry (deliberately quoted in full) reveals what a superb diarist Andersen is, lively, unashamedly personal, with a keen eye and ear, fluid in style, moving from the inward to the external world and back again with an instinctual ease – and ingenuous (surely a virtue rather than otherwise in a diary-writer). In contrast, he was but an indifferent autobiographer, disingenuous, sometimes to the point of psychological dishonesty, and too often unwilling to impose adequate control on self-indulgently over-abundant material. What a lot we learn from this record of 28 June. We have a vivid impression of Dickens's own open, manly, masterful charm, and of his confident approach to writing, his own and that of authors he admired; we have an excellent example in the quotation from his critic, given by Andersen, of English pharisaism, more redolent of journalistic self-importance than true religious conviction, and a lightly executed cameo of the Kentish scene. It also tells one a good deal more about Andersen's behaviour in the Dickens household and its attitude to him than he intended or realised. Which is not to say that he was unaware of the nature of these.

Andersen's stay with Dickens (11 June–15 July) has entered literary history, and we encounter it principally for two reasons: to show the tragicomic extent of Andersen's naïve egotism, and to illustrate the last stage of Dickens' s strained marriage which would end in a publicly announced separation the following year. This is the biographer's territory, not the literary critic's, but I believe Andersen's unhappy experiences of summer 1857 were not without effect, even considerable effect, on the course his work would afterwards take. And it is the diaries, written for himself, that best provide us with intimations of this.

‘Long for Mr Dickens, short for me!’ Mercifully Andersen never knew what Dickens would famously write after he had gone, words placed on the guestroom mantelpiece: ‘Hans Andersen [sic] slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family AGES!’ But Andersen's own records show that he would not have been wholly surprised, that he was all too aware he was outstaying his welcome – if, after the very first, welcome was what he was given – and yet unable to do anything about the situation, either to save it or to remove himself from it.

Andersen's curiosity never forsook him, even if it were exercised from an extremely self-centred viewpoint, and he was observantly interested by Dickens's sons, recording the not insignificant names their father had chosen for them: ‘Charles Dickens, Walter Landor, Francis Jeffrey, Alfred Tennyson, Sydney Smith, Henry Fielding, Edward Bulwer Lytton,’121 a real roll-call of distinguished English men among whom Dickens clearly counted himself and which he hoped that his offspring would in some measure join. Andersen didn't endear himself very greatly to these boys – his paper-cuts pleased them only at first and they giggled at his making little nosegays of flowers – and this he realised, but he took his own side rather than theirs, as was his general habit. Perhaps, on reflection, he was right to do so here. The Dickens boys strike one all too clearly as the casual-mannered products of a culture (England itself rather than that generated by Dickens personally) too pleased with itself by half. Andersen's often detailed accounts of his time with the family convince one as accurate, for all the note of self-pity. Charles (Charles junior, eldest son) was obviously irritated at having to drive the guest to Rochester to be shaved, though he did later try to be affable and make up for his bad grace (‘he must have his moods’). Walter, second son, then sixteen and in a few weeks' time to set out for seven years in India as an officer in Calcutta, was even less disposed to be hospitable.¹²² Deputised to be Andersen's escort in the country and the town, he clearly was bored by the role, as he was by the distinguished visitor himself. ‘At Gravesend [after returning from central London] I saw Walter Dickens; at Higham he [and a friend] came; neither of them showed any particular attentiveness or interest in helping me by taking my luggage.’¹²³ Seeing the youth later at an al fresco lunch, Andersen noted: ‘Young Walter Dickens asinine! I'm thinking of his father.’ In point of fact the life ahead of Walter is sad to think about. He was an unsatisfactory officer; Indian army life didn't suit him. He got badly into debt and had a breakdown. He died in Calcutta of an aneurysm before he could be invalided home. Somehow Andersen's portrait of him in his diary pages suggests the possibility of this fate: through the prism of his own private complaints he saw what he was like.

Though to Dickens's exasperation Andersen would publish a laudatory article about the Dickens family in his publisher's magazine, Bentley's Miscellany,¹²⁴ likening Catherine Dickens to Agnes in David Copperfield, that serene model of wifehood and motherhood, in his diary he unmistakably suggests an air of unease in the household. Catherine's sister Georgina who was in fact later to remain with her brother-in-law and his children after Catherine's legally arranged departure comes across as watchful, unfriendly, potentially subverting, actually resenting Andersen's presence. Andersen's own misery during his visit may surely have been caused by his realisation that something was gravely amiss in the family set-up, and his inability to get at it, hampered not just by his clumsy, faltering English but by something in his own temperament. None of his writings, after all, show any insight into marriage, or even into sustained relationships between the sexes. The same goes for the complexities of connections within a family. The underlying tensions of the Dickens boys' relationship with their extraordinary, magnetic father eluded him. And he lacked those robust, extrovert capacities that would have enabled him to join in their more ordinary recreations and entertainments and to establish easier communication with them.

All his life the only family he ever properly knew were the Collins. To them he had laid heavy emotional siege almost from the first, and we have observed in the course of this book the problems – the possible resentments, jealousies and competitiveness – that this had involved, though with the years there grew between himself and the family members a steadiness of acceptance, and of reciprocal affection too. The next decade and a half were to see Andersen spending considerable amounts of time with Jonas Collin's grandsons – to whom he was a benevolent, not always tactful but basically concerned de facto godparent. But his experiences of Dickens's family life almost certainly confirmed some melancholy inner knowledge of himself, of just how much he was one of the world's loners.

For that matter, though he always writes in laudatory and grateful terms about Dickens himself in diaries, letters, and published work, the personality of the greatest English writer of his times as he watched it manifest itself in all its varieties must also have uncomfortably overwhelmed him.

Though I have suggested in my account of their 1847 dealings with each other that the two men probably had more affinities with one another imaginatively than either had with any other contemporary, yet their temperaments – and where these led them in social and emotional life – were significantly dissimilar. Dickens's propensity to heartiness has almost nothing in common with Andersen's publicly vaunted super-sensitivities, as that entry for 28 June showed. Dickens must (unwittingly) have reminded him – as the very different Edvard Collin and his novelistic stand-ins did in a different way (the Bernardos and Vilhelms of literature and life) – just how apart he was from most other men, of the uniqueness of the haunted, spirit-populated chambers of his own mind.

Dickens made his London house in Tavistock Square open to him, and Andersen was mesmerised by his friend's acting in his collaborative work with Wilkie Collins, the melodrama The Frozen Deep.125 The audience he was invited to join couldn't fail to impress him either; Queen Victoria and the Queen of Belgium headed its luminaries, and Dickens told Andersen that Victoria knew him to be there. Nobody thrilled more to the spell of the stage or had been more successful in a national theatre than Andersen in Copenhagen, yet his theatre activities there, with his difficult relationship with the Heibergs and his belief in an aesthetic world complementary to the ordinary one, did not resemble the barnstorming performances of Dickens and his team.

In fact I conjecture that something in the whole strident philistine vigour of English life, in contrast with his feted Society sampling of it ten years previously, jarred on him. Certain it is that the literary works he applied himself to when he returned from an English sojourn he knew, deep down, to have been a failure, are outstanding for their involved artistry, their intricate experimentation, their pursuit of the spiritual roots of culture (and indeed of the cultural roots of spirituality), their comparative retreat from the pressures of the humdrum. I cannot believe this to be altogether coincidental, any more than I can that Andersen did not au fond understand why, after a polite reply to his thank-you letter, Dickens never wrote to him again and never agreed to any of his requests (to meet Danish visitors to London, etc.). Of course he knew why he didn't, knew too that the reasons were profound ones, inseparable from the nature of his own creativity, from his mysterious heightened sensitivity to pain and joy, rendering hearty extroverted social participation an ultimate impossibility.

And did the protracted and difficult company of Andersen make no impact on Dickens the writer? I believe that in what is for me our greatest novelist's supreme (and certainly most artistically harmonious) masterpiece, Great Expectations (1860–61) we can find (conjectural) evidence that his contact with the Danish writer passed through the crucible of Dickens's imagination. Pip is after all from a humble background without any parents, and is transported – through (unknown and mis-identified) patronage – into a world of prosperity and comparative refinement which he, with his complexity of nature, at once admires to the point of eager emulation and sees through. As Andersen's tended to be, Pip's saints are from the economic background he came from (literally in the case of his brother-in-law, Joe Gargery) and his villains from the sneering hyper-confident upper class, like Bentley Drummle who marries and mistreats his princesse lointaine, Estella. At the same time – cf. O.T. – there is pervasive fear of the more disorientated members of the lower class destructively asserting themselves to wreak their worst (Orlick, and the convict Compeyson, and, for much of the book, Pip's benefactor, Magwitch himself). It is not hard to see the correspondences in the novel of landscape to the complexities and travails of human emotions as strongly reminiscent of Andersen's own use of Nature. And is it wholly a coincidence that the landscape in question is a huge tract of marshland? Andersen himself after all was a ‘marsh-plant’ (indeed, his next significant work will take us to marshes again), and we have to remember that two works of his that we know Dickens to have admired, The Improvisatore and ‘The Ugly Duckling’, offer us unforgettable descriptions of this geographical feature.

But more important is the type of work Great Expectations is: a mythopoeic novel for which ‘romance’ as employed by Hawthorne is as good a term as any. Without sacrificing acute observation of people and society, it operates on a psychic level; that is, it presents its characters primarily in their (utterly convincing) psychic affect, above all for the narrator himself and the course he is trying to steer through the maze of life. Does it not belong to the same genus of literary achievement – not so much as Madame Bovary or L'Education sentimentale, in other ways its peers – as ‘The Snow Queen’ or, as we shall see, its contemporary ‘The Ice Maiden’ (1861)? Its extraordinary events, its characters like Miss Havisham or the lawyer Jaggers who possess the solipsistic powers we associate with fairy-tale persons, combine to form a unified metaphor about existence, of deepest visual and aural impact, and the same can be said for Andersen's masterworks.