Notes

References and Abbreviations

Original texts of all stories quoted can be found on www.adl.dk (Arkiv for Danske Litteratur) and on www.andersen.sdu.dk. Numbered notes also refer readers to the pages of the Collected Reitzel (Det Reitzelske Forlag) edition of 1893, Eventyr og Historier, abbreviation: E og H Vols I-V. The website www.andersen.sdu.dk is also the source of Johan de Mylius's Year by Year, biographical tables of Andersen's life and works, abbreviation: Y by Y + Year, an online version of Johan de Mylius's day-by-day biography, Hans Christian Andersens liv. Dag for Dag (The Life of Hans Christian Andersen Day by Day). Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1998, itself an expansion of his Hans Christian Andersen, liv og værk: En tidstavle (Hans Christian Andersen, Life and Work: A Timetable). Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1993. Johan de Mylius is also the author of an invaluable study of the fairy-tales Forvandlingens pris: (H.C. Andersen and his Fairy-tales) H.C. Andersen og hans eventyr (The Price of Transformation). Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, Gyldendal, 2004/2005.

The text of the novels quoted is from the following editions, to which notes also refer; the abbreviations used throughout the notes are in parenthesis:

Improvisatore (Imp). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900

O.T. (O.T.). Copenhagen: Gyldendals Trane-Klassikere, 1948

Kun en Spillemand (KES). Danske Klassikere/Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/Borgen, 1988

De to Baronesse (DTB). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1903

‘At være eller ikke være’ (AVEIV). Danske Klassikere/Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/Borgen, 2001

Lykke-Peer (LP). Danske Klassikere/Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/Borgen, 2000

En Digters Bazar (EDB). Danske Klassikere/Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/Borgen, 2006

The English quotations from My Fairy-Tale Life are from the new translation of Mit Livs Eventyr by W. Glyn Jones. Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus, 2013; abbreviation: MF-TL. Quotations from the Diaries are from The Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen, selected and translated by Patricia L. Conroy and Sven H. Rossel. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1990 – abbreviation D. For the travelogue Skyggebilleder, etc. they are from Shadow Pictures, translated by Anna Halager and edited by Sven Hakon Rossel and Monica Wenusch. Vienna: Praesens Verlag, 2011. Abbreviation in Notes SP.

Abbreviations for regularly cited secondary material:

Jackie Wullschlager HCA: Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000

Jens Andersen HCA: Jens Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life, translated by Tiina Nunnally. New York: Woodstock, London: Duckworth, 2005

Elias Bredsdorff HCA: Elias Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen, London: Phaidon, 1975

Tatar AA: The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, edited by Maria Tatar. New York: W.W.Norton, 2008

All other books referred to, Danish English, primary or secondary, are given full titles in text or notes. Danish is a member of the Scandinavian group of Germanic languages (of the Indo-European family) and descends from the East Norse dialects of Old Norse. It is as good as mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Swedish, certainly in written form, but Danes and Swedes find it somewhat harder to understand each other than either does Norwegian. Norwegian, in this case, means the far more widely used of Norway's two official languages, bokmål (rather than the West Norwegian-based nynorsk (formerly known as landsmål), since it is actually derived from Danish as Norway's administrative language for centuries under Danish ownership (Dual Monarchy). Unlike Norwegian and Swedish, Danish is not tonal, but has a sound system markedly different not only from these two languages but also from most other languages in the world – a tendency to engulf or assimilate consonants, and the vocal ‘stød’ (‘push’), halfway to the glottal stop, which give it its strong aural character. Dialects have waned since the middle of the last century, though they do survive, especially in Jutland and on Bornholm. Standard Danish is in spoken use throughout this nation of 5.6 million. Danish reformed its spelling/orthography in 1948.

Introductory: Europe, Denmark, the World

1. Fædrelandet, founded in 1834 as a weekly, became a regular newspaper at New Year 1840, with Andersen's friend, the Liberal politician Orla Lehmann (see Chapter 1, note 69) on its staff. A progressive paper, it was instrumental in its demands that Denmark have a proper Constitution (as it did in 1849) and was a great supporter of the Danish cause in Schleswig. The editor at this point was the National Liberal supporter, Carl Plougmand.

2. With its first issue dated 3 January 1749, Berlingske Tidende is one of the world's oldest newspapers. It has been, and is, of conservative tendency and has a circulation (2013) of c.103,000.

3. For a clear summary, see Knud V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark, translated by Ivan Hill and Christopher Wade. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 21–26.

4. Published in Fædrelandet on 5 March 1850.

5. Jespersen, op. cit., p. 66. This protocol was a revision of the earlier one of 2 August 1852; its signatories were Austria, France, Prussia, Russia and Britain, together with Denmark and Sweden.

6. Both stories were published in book form in the year of their first appearance, 1852, ‘The Swan's Nest’ on 5 April as one of the stories in Historier; ‘Thousands of Years to Come’ on 30 November in Historier. Anden Samling (Stories. Second Collection).

7. E og H Vol II p. 266.

8. H[ans].C[hristian]. Ørsted (1777–1851). A major figure in Andersen's life (see throughout this study), than whom, at his own declaration, Andersen loved nobody more. Physicist, chemist, writer and prominent public intellectual, he was born in Rudkøbing on the island of Langeland (off Fyn), and he and his brother Anders, sons of a pharmacist, were largely educated at home before going on to the University of Copenhagen, where both did brilliantly. A Kantian dedicated to the supreme importance of investigating and understanding the natural world, he became involved with problems in physics after meeting the German physicist Ritter. Through Ritter he developed research leading to his discovery – on 21 April 1818 – that electric currents create magnetic fields, a key aspect of electromagnetism. He became a professor at the University of Copenhagen in 1806, and was deeply involved in Danish cultural life and the pursuit of philosophical, religious and literary matters.

9. E og H Vol II p. 268.

10. ‘Locksley Hall’, a long poem by Alfred Tennyson. Andersen later admired Tennyson sufficiently to include an image of him on the decorated screen he made in his last years. Though published in 1842, this poem probably dates from 1837–38, and takes the form of a monologue by a man revisi-ting the house by the sea where he and his cousin fell in love. His unhappiness that she married another is projected on to the present-day world, so that progress, which the poet himself followed keenly, is viewed as a series of occasions for alarm. In Alfred Tennyson, The Major Works, edited by Adam Roberts. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2009; ‘Locksley Hall’ 119–138, pp. 106–107.

11. Y by Y 1853 for 31 May ff. It appears that the previous year Andersen was actually given demonstrations of the telegraph line by those working on it. The writer Carsten Hauch (1790–1872) was also on the Board of Directors for the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen. Born in Norway, he returned to Denmark as a boy, and at age 17 was a volunteer against the British invasion. He became friendly with Oehlenschäger (see note 18) whom he was to succeed in 1851 as Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. He studied science, and while pursuing studies in France had a foot amputated. His earlier poetry and plays were not critical successes; the five novels beginning with the still highly regarded patriotic romance Vilhelm Zabern (1834) and ending with Robert Fulton (1853), so admired by Andersen, fared far better. So did the tragedies he wrote between 1841 and 1866, though the lyrical poems of the 1850s and 1860s are the works of his that have survived the best.

12. D p.48.

13. David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy. London: Penguin, 2011, pp. 176–191.

14. ‘Billedbog uden Billeder’. Copenhagen: Reitzel (Det Reitzelske Forlag), 1845 edition, pp. 29–31.

15. E og G Vol II, p. 230.

16. Tatar AA pp. 168–192, which actually appends a translation of Mathias Winther's version – from his Danske Folkeeventyr (Danish Folk Tales, 1823) – to an illuminatingly footnoted translation of Andersen's magnificent story, far more concerned with the feeling life than the transcribed folk tale. Winther (1795–1834), like Andersen from Fyn, and like him too in having a difficult family background with financial hardship, was a seminal figure for the serious examination of Danish folk inheritance. It is possible, despite the popularity of some of his publications, that he never had his proper literary due on account of the chaotic nature of his personal life with its extramarital scandals.

17. Tycho Brahe features recurrently in Andersen's writings, becoming for him not just a supreme representative of the Danish genius for inquiry, for studies transcending immediate worldly concerns, but also for the country's less than wholehearted gratitude to its most remarkable sons. Repeatedly Andersen draws attention to Brahe's departure from the country as an illustration of this. After receiving handsome royal patronage – enabling the construction of the Uranienborg observatories on the island of Hven – Brahe fell out with the new king, Christian IV, and went to work for the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II in Prague, where he was assisted by Johannes Kepler.

18. Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850), a writer vital to the whole culture of his times, whose character he played a pre-eminent part in forming, and vital too to Andersen's own life and career; at times we can almost believe that Andersen based his career on the older man's. Their backgrounds, however, were very different; Oehlenschläger and his sister grew up in Frederiksberg Castle, and he was given a childhood of freedom without formal education until he was 12 years old. Adam then went to the college known as Posterity's High School. Its principal was the poet Edvard Storm who taught a course in Scandinavian mythology, thus setting the boy on course for his life's work. Though he was first attracted to the stage, he followed the advice of the Ørsted brothers to pursue studies instead at Copenhagen University, but never completed them. A meeting with the Norwegian/Danish philosopher, Henrik Steffens (1773–1845) was a turning-point in his life, and from then on he dedicated himself to poetic drama and poetry, celebrating the great religious and mythopoeic traditions of the Norse. By 26 he was able to collect, in two volumes, his Poetiske Skrifter (Poetic Writings) among which is the long verse-play Aladdin, which gave the Danes a hero with whom to identify. He met Fichte in Berlin, Goethe in Weimar, Tieck in Dresden; major works contemporaneous with these friendships are Hakon Jarl and Baldur hin Gode (both 1807). In 1810 he became Professor of Aesthetics at Copenhagen University. In 1829 he was publicly crowned – by Sweden's Esaas Tegnér – as ‘King of Nordic Poetry’, and has the best claim of any to be regarded as Denmark's foremost Romantic poet.

19. Bertel Thorvaldsen (1768–1844). Thorvaldsen, like Andersen, came from a poor background. His father was an Icelandic shipyard woodcarver with an alcohol addiction. Thorvaldsen would work for him even after he had been admitted, with the financial support of friends, to the Copenhagen Academy at the age of 11. A prize-studded Academy student, he was awarded a royal bursary to pursue studies in Rome, and henceforward would celebrate the day of his arrival in Rome – 8 March 1797 – as his real birthday, the proper beginning of his life. Guided by the Danish archaeologist resident in Rome, Georg Zoëga, he concentrated on Greek rather than Roman antiquities, and became an authority on them. His statue of Jason (1802–03) was his first acclaimed work, praised by Antonio Canova (1757–1822), together with whom he would become the leading sculptor of Neoclassicism. He was a central figure in Rome's artistic colony, and became the only non-Italian commissioned to create a monument in St Peter's: the tomb of Pius XII (begun 1824, completed 1831). His years in Rome saw such masterpieces as the bust of Lord Byron – Andersen would take down verbatim an account Thorvaldsen gave him of the poet ‘sitting’ for this – and the equestrian statue of Poniatowski, and also in 1820 the great works for the Vor Frue Kirke (Church of Our Lady) in Copenhagen, now Copenhagen Cathedral, perhaps his most impressive legacy. By 1833 he had been appointed Director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and was making plans for the Thorvaldsen Museum, work on which, under the architect M.G. Bindesbøll, would begin in 1837. In 1838 he made an official and triumphantly received return to Copenhagen, where he mixed in circles Andersen would also frequent, such as the estate of Baron and Baroness Stampe. See Dyveke Helsted, Eva Henschen and Bjarne Jørnæs, Thorvaldsen. Copenhagen: The Thorvaldsen Museum, 2003. Also see John Henderson, The Triumph of Art at Thorvaldsen's Museum, ‘Love’ in Copenhagen. University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculum Press, 2007.

20. Valdemar Vedel (1865–1942), poet and literary critic. In 1890 he would publish Studier over Guldalderen i Dansk Digtning (Studies of the Golden Age in Danish Writing). Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsens Forlag. Also see Patricia G. Berman, In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, pp. 18 and 192–193.

21. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant's influence on Danish Golden Age intellectuals – refracted in Andersen's own thought and works – is of incalculable dimensions. Born in East Prussia's Königsberg (today's Kaliningrad) into a strong Pietistic household, he spent his entire life in that city, entering the university there at age 16 and remaining in the institution throughout his whole career. He published his first philosophical work when he was 23, but distinguished himself early as an astronomer and anthropologist, and it was only after a silence that he produced the first of the great critiques which made him a figure of unassailable intellectual magnitude: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), followed by Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason, 1788) and Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement, 1790). Kant held that morality proceeds from reason and that the structure of our minds determines our Weltanschauungen. There is the noumenal – the world of things outside the self, with autonomous existences – and the phenomenal – the world of our experiences. Morality/reason justifies belief in God (and in divine virtue), even though we can have no empirical knowledge of such a being.

22. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). It was principally through Oehlenschläger that Fichte's ideas entered Danish culture. A student of Kant's philosophy in 1790, he sent his own tract on ‘subjective idealism’ to Kant himself, who published it in 1792. He became Professor of Philosophy at Jena in 1794, and wrote a series of influential treatises, though controversy over his alleged atheism led to his being removed from his position. He became Rector of the new University of Berlin in 1810. Existence was viewed in the subjective terms of Ego, with God as Absolute Mind – or Ur-Ich – and the world beyond the self as the Non-Ego. His ideas were of a strongly nationalist tendency, with the latent ascription of the Ego, the moral being, to the entire German people.

23. Thorvaldsen's is the beautiful Twenty-Fourth Evening of the ‘Picturebook-Without-Pictures’ (Billedbog uden Billeder, Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1845, pp. 55–57), which commemorates his boyhood in poverty, his artistic successes in Rome and his triumphant return to Denmark. Ørsted is the subject of ‘To Brødre’ (‘Two Brothers’, 1859) together with his brother, Anders Sandøe Ørsted (1778–1860), jurist, politician and Prime Minister 1853–54 (but forced to resign for his ultra-conservative policies). He is also honoured in ‘Oldefader’ (‘Great-grandfather’, 1870). And the kind of experiments in natural science he approved of – and which Andersen had himself carried out – occasioned ‘Vanddraaben’ (‘A Drop of Water’, 1848), showing the teeming life this minute particle contains; Andersen dedicated the tale to him.

24. The term is Ørsted's, though he also coined a purely German alternative, Gedankenversuch. A hypothesis is followed through so that all its potentials as well as likely consequences become apparent. It need have no practical significance, but often by showing up validity or invalidity within any theory, it can be of great use in a variety of fields.

25. This poem-sequence was intended to span science and poetry, showing that science's latest and most adventurous inventions had all the imaginative appeal of a poem. The picture-boards of the original edition depicted hot-air balloons.

26. The three newspapers in question were Fædrelandet, Berlingske Tidende and Kjøbenhavnposten. The verses, in a setting taken from the music of composer C.E.F. Weyse (1774–1842), were sung as the cortège paused by Oehlenschläger's birthplace.

27. E og H Vol II p. 232.

Part One: From Skyggebilleder (Shadow-Pictures) to ‘Skyggen’ (‘The Shadow’)

Chapter 1: William Christian Walter

1. Ejnar Stig Askgaard, ‘The Lineage of Hans Christian Andersen’, www.museum.odense.dk.

2. See Chapter 4, O.T., note 20.

3. MF-TL p. 12. ‘I was an only child, and was extremely spoiled, but my mother constantly told me how very much happier I was than she had been, and that I was being brought up like the son of a count.’ Of course, Andersen could legitimately have retorted that by this sentence he meant he was the only child of both his parents, but nevertheless this and similar passages do give an impression that he was an only child tout court. Likewise he recalls parties held in Odense Tugthus – certainly occasions most of his readers would not have shared – but bowdlerises them. His parents become mere friends of the jailer; there is no mention of the familial connection with the institution.

4. MF-TL pp. 12 and 18. See also Ejnar Stig Askgaard. ‘The Lineage of Hans Christian Andersen’, www.museum.odense.dk.

5. MF-TL pp. 12–13.

6. Jean de la Fontaine (1621–95). A learned man, deeply versed in the classics and brought up in the country, he spent his adult life in Paris, associating with both Racine and Molière. Drawing on his fund of literary knowledge – and Aesop – his work is remarkably original, giving readers a new, witty and thoughtful way of relating humankind to animals, and vice versa. Fontaine's fables first appeared in six volumes in 1668: Fables choisies mises en vers (Selected Fables Put into Verse).

7. Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754). Only Andersen has created characters who have entered the Danish national consciousness as thoroughly as those of Holberg's comedies, expressly influenced by Molière and the Italian commedia dell’ arte – from Jeppe paa Bjerget (Jeppe on the Hill, 1722), which portrays a ‘transformed peasant’, through the eponymous Mester Gert Westphaler and Erasmus Montanus (1723) to Den forvandlede Brudgrom (The Changed Bridegroom, 1753). Holberg was born (at the time of the dual monarchy) in Bergen, Norway, but spent most of his life in Denmark; he was, however, a great traveller, and made a significant stay in England, including a spell at Oxford. He was a humanist, a deist, a historian and a moralist who expressed his thoughts through the essay much in the manner of Montaigne.

8. Askgaard, Lineage, op. cit.

9. Y by Y 1810.

10. Askgaard, Lineage, op. cit. Y by Y 1818, which contains Professor de Mylius's observations.

11. Askgaard, Lineage, op. cit.

12. Andersen's own Notes, E og H Vol V, pp. 318–319.

13. E og H Vol II, pp. 308–318.

14. ‘Odense’, a poem published in Illustreret Tidende, 21 February 1875.

15. MF-TL p. 14.

16. Det kongelige Teater (The Royal Theatre) was built by the court architect Niels Eigtved in 1748, with major renovations in 1772. The company based there visited Odense annually. See Frederick J. Marker, Hans Christian Andersen and the Romantic Theatre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971, pp. 3–5.

17. Giuseppi Casorti (1749–1826). Italian actor and troupe-leader, born into a theatre family. He spent his last twenty years in Denmark, based at Prices' Teatret in Vesterbro, but maintaining Italian traditions. See Marker, op. cit. pp. 15 and 29. Andersen was much taken with his Harlequin Foreman of the Threshers. MF-TL p. 23.

18. See the tribute in MF-TL p. 27 to Madame Bunkeflod, to whom Andersen would read aloud and for whom he made a white pincushion which she preserved, and to Herr Iversen, ibid., p. 34. The actors from Copenhagen whenever they were in Odense would call on Herr Iversen every day, as the young Andersen noted. So it made good sense for him to ask the printer for a letter of introduction that would be useful to him on arrival in Copenhagen. The letter Herr Iversen actually gave the boy, in good faith, to Madame Schall from the Royal Ballet, did not have the desired result.

19. Y by Y 1818. Y by Y 1819.

20. Y by Y 1819, Askgaard, Lineage, op. cit.

21. MF-TL p. 44.

22. Giuseppe Siboni was born in Forlì, Italy, and sang with Italian opera companies throughout Europe – in Genoa, Prague, Milan (La Scala), London (The King's Theatre), Rome (Teatro Argentina), Naples (Teatro San Carlo). Between 1810 and 1814 he was a friend of Beethoven's in Vienna. King Christian VIII invited him to Denmark, where he joined the Royal Theatre Company in 1829. He founded the Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen in 1825 (to be re-founded by the composer Gade in 1867), and was made Kongelig Kammersanger (Royal Chamber Singer).

23. C[hristoph E[rnst] F[riedrich] Weyse (1774–1842) the most famous composer of his day, and an arbiter of Danish musical taste. As a young man he had enjoyed the friendship of Mozart's widow, who had likened him to her husband. Like Mozart, he was a brilliant pianist much in demand. Weyse remained always true to the classical style, rejecting the advanced compositions of Beethoven; this is shown in his seven symphonies and, even more markedly, in his piano pieces. He became a professor at the University of Copenhagen in 1816, and in 1819 composer at the Royal Court, which had a special relationship with the Royal Theatre.

24. Jens Baggesen (1764–1826). His life and literary career have significant affinities with Andersen's own. Born into poverty, he passed an unhappy childhood and youth, and several times attempted to kill himself. Yet his first successful writings – and they were very successful – were comic verses. His opera Holger Danske (1789) was attacked as being insufficiently patriotic and too influenced by German writing. This upset Baggesen sufficiently for him to spend the next twenty years out of Denmark, and even to write in German. However in 1792–93 he published his two-volume account (in Danish) of his travels, Labyrinten (The Labyrinth), which had enormous influence on Danish prose: see Chapter 2. From 1806 to 1820 Baggesen was back in Denmark, usually in a state of feud with its writers and cultural figures, so Andersen was lucky to have seen him as he did, not least because the following year he departed his native country once more. His last years were marked by familial tragedy, debt and acute melancholia. He died in Hamburg in a Freemasons' Hospital.

25. Levnedsbogen – which Andersen wanted published only in the event of his early death but which was then thought to have been lost – was discovered and published by the scholar Hans Brix in 1926. It was later issued, annotated and edited by H. Topsøe-Jensen, in 1962. The autobiography commissioned by Carl Lorck – and translated into English by Mary Howitt as The True Story of My Life. London: Longman Brown Green and Longmans, 1847 – was not put out in Danish until 1942 as Mit eget Eventyr uden Digtning!, edited by Helge Topsøe-Jensen. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag/Arnold Busck. Mit Livs Eventyr (My Fairy-Tale Life) came out from Reitzel of Copenhagen in 1855; revised edition 1859. Andersen's American translator, Horace E. Scudder (working with the English Mary Howitt), asked – for his English-language version published in New York and London, Paddington Press in 1871 – for additional chapters covering the years 1855–67, which Andersen supplied. These did not appear in Danish until the new edition (Reitzel also) of the book in 1877, after Andersen's death.

26. B[ernhard] S[everin] Ingemann (1789–1862). A clergyman's son, Ingemann began his literary career as a poet, publishing while still a student, and then as a dramatist, before launching himself as a prose-writer with a story about Bornholm (1820) and tales influenced by Hoffmann. In 1822 he was appointed instructor in Danish Language and Literature at Sorø Academy, and from then on played a strong part in Danish literary culture. In 1826 he began his series of Scott-inspired novels, successful in their own time, about the Danish past. He also wrote a sequence of poems for children, Morgen- og Aften-Sange (Morning and Evening Songs, 1837) and hymns which became popular. He was a close friend of N.F.S. Grundtvig, whose interests and ideals he shared. In his diary for 5 October 1825 Andersen describes visiting Sorø and going a walk with Ingemann: ‘he told me that once when he was recovering from an illness a gremlin came in to him that was stranger than anything he had ever seen before and bowed and grimaced at him, and sat by his bed. … It is his idea that I was born to write novels in order to describe the lower class’ (D. p. 9).

27. Grundtvig. All thinking Danes, Andersen included, had to define their views on religion, culture and society in relation to this all-embracing thinker and public personage. For an excellent appraisal of his work and legacy see Knud V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark, translated Ivan Hill and Christopher Wade. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 112–122 and W. Glyn Jones, Denmark: A Modern History. London: Croom Helm, 1986, pp. 52–58. Also passim in this study.

28. Just Mathias Thiele (1795–1874), a pivotal figure in the Danish Golden Age. From 1817 he worked in the Royal Danish Library, during which period he collected Danish folk tales by travelling round the countryside: Danske Folkesagn (Danish Folk Legends, 1818–23), I–IV. A scholarship took him to Rome, where he became a close friend of Thorvaldsen's, writing on him, editing him and in due course being responsible for his biography – in four volumes 1851–56. He was Secretary of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 1825–71. For his work as a folklorist see Timothy R. Tangherlini, Danish Folktales, Legends and Other Stories. Washington: University of Washington Press, 2013, pp. 22–23 in particular. ‘Thiele's role in Danish literary life should not be underestimated.’

29. Knud Lyne Rahbek (1760–1830). In addition to his own writings and influential translations, especially from the English, Rahbek is credited with having founded the study of literary history in Denmark with his five-volume Bidrag til en Oversigt over den danske Digtekonst (Contribution to a survey of Danish Poetry, 1820–29), in collaboration with the scholar Rasmus Nyerup. His wife Kamma, an artist and great letter-writer, enjoyed a reputation as a saloniste, and so some of the success of Bakkehuset gatherings must certainly be attributed to her. Andersen when a young guest there very much liked talking to Kamma Rahbek, but said that her husband, in contrast, never brought himself actually to address him (MF-TL pp. 50–51). Rahbek also wrote a good many drinking and club-life songs.

30. Marker, op. cit. p. 30. (Taken from Søren Kierkegaard, Samlede Værker, xiv, Copenhagen, 1963, p. 118.)

31. Jonas Collin (1776–1861). Though he is remembered primarily for his work in cultural matters, and his unflagging assistance to artists and scholars (not only Andersen) – on the board of directors of the National Theatre; responsibility for the royal fund ad usus publicos – this highly educated lawyer, linguist and philosophically trained intellectual was a key public official, one of the most enlightened and influential administrators of the Absolute Monarchy in its last phase. His sense in fiscal matters derived from his work in the Finance Secretariat; he understood banking in detail. He was involved with public works and exhibitions in Copenhagen, and took a practical and reformist interest in agriculture. He largely welcomed the liberalising reforms of 1848/49 and had friends among its strongest advocates. He married Henriette Christine in 1802; she had previously been married to his teacher, Michael Gottlieb Birckner (1756–98), by whom she had two daughters.

32. Robbers of Vissenburg in Fyn. A scene from this was actually published at the time, in A.P. Liunge's magazine, Harpen, on Friday 9 August 1822. Says Marker, op. cit. p. 31, ‘the melodramatic dialogue in the robbers' den gives ample evidence of the drama's exaggerated Sturm und Drang tendencies’. Readers today can judge for themselves because it is included – in modern Danish orthography – in Johan de Mylius's excellent HCA et livs digtning (HCA: A Life's Writing), Aschehoug, 2005.

33. Die Räuber (The Robbers, published 1781). Schiller's prose-drama concerns the fate of a young nobleman, Karl von Moor, a reckless young student, done out of his inheritance by his cunning, materialistic, dishonest brother Franz. Believing his father has died (in fact he is imprisoned in a dungeon by Franz), and hating all the injustice of the conventional world, he goes out into the Bohemian forest and becomes leader of a robber band. Though Karl succeeds in finding his father, in arranging for Franz's capture (Franz eludes this by committing suicide) and in retaining the love of Amalia (whom Franz has pursued), he cannot break free of the robbers, but is deeply ashamed of the crimes the band has committed. In the end he gives himself up to justice. Its dialectic of liberty (which contains anarchy) and a controlling civilisation (which inevitably entails both convention and corruption) had deep appeal for the century ahead. We can detect the direct influence of Die Räuber on both Scott and Andersen (see Section 5 of the present chapter). Tolstoy was to make a list of literary works particularly important to him and cited Schiller's The Robbers as a ‘very great influence’ (Henri Troyat, Tolstoy. London: W.H. Allen, 1968, p. 56), and we can see this in his early work, The Cossacks (1852–53).

34. Alfsol. Andersen took the subject matter for this play from P.F. Suhm, Nordiske Noveller (Nordic Novelle, 1783).

35. MF-TL p. 57.

36. Simon Meisling (1787–1856). Meisling has had such a spectacularly bad press, above all from his most distinguished pupil, that it is worth emphasising that Collin, Rahbek et al. had perfectly good reason to believe good of him and think that the Grammar School Board had done well to appoint him to the Slagelse headship. He was an established classical philologist and translator of classical poetry, who went on to produce a verse translation of Virgil's Aeneid. He was a humanist, largely progressive and enlightened in his views on education, and in addition to classical works, translated Shakespeare, Gozzi and Goethe. Sincerely interested in his students, he sadly found it almost impossible to get on well with them, few of them liking him, while his home life was unhappy and disorderly.

37. Youthful Attempts. While Andersen himself used the form ‘Villiam’, I have used Shakespeare's name ‘William’ correctly in my chapter title, to point up the loftiness of Andersen's view of and ambitions for himself.

38. D p. 7.

39. Skælskør. MF-TL pp. 68–69, including the quoted sentence.

40. A couple researching family history had been loaned one of the four cases, and there came across the manuscript. However, it was Esben Brage who took the matter up, with the results outlined. Professor Jørn Lund, a philological expert, points out that the word ‘for[m]fuldendt’ (‘flawless’), doesn't occur in Andersen's writings untill thirty years later (www.avisen.dk, 21 December 2012). Professor Christian Graugaard, Professor of Sexology at Aalborg – author, and a regular contributor to Politiken – considers it a story about the phallus and ejaculation, and I would not substantially disagree with this reading (Kultur, Danish Broadcasting Corporation, 22 December 2012).

41. All quotes from ‘Tællelyset’ are from its first publication, in the 12 December 2012 issue of the Danish newspaper, Politiken.

42. This poem was first printed in Kjøbenhavnsposten on 25 September 1827, side by side with a German translation by Ludolph Schley.

43. MF-TL pp. 76–77.

44. ‘Fritz’ Petit (1809–54) and Carl Bagger (1807–46): see Chapter 5, discussion of ‘Ugly Duckling’.

45. For a detailed and largely sympathetic (to both parties) account of the friendship of Andersen with Edvard Collin, see the whole of Chapter 4 in Jens Andersen HCA pp. 148–212, which not only puts it into the context of Romantic friendship and the expression of male–male relations acceptable to the times, but also analyses Edvard's 1882 book about his friend.

46. Ejnar Stig Askgaard: ‘En akademisk borger’, in Ejnar Stig Askgaard, editor, Anderseniana 2000 Odense: Odense bys museer, 2001, pp. 79–90, together with a transcription of the Andersen 1830 dissertation: ‘At udvikle de græske og nordiske Mythers Forskjellighed i Lighederne og deres Overeenskomst i Forskjelighederne’ (‘To explain the difference between Greek and Nordic myths in the similarities and their common basis in [the] differences’).

47. Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860). As critic and arbiter of Danish cultural opinion, Heiberg's standing and influence in his own times can scarcely be exaggerated. Throughout his life Andersen would consider his views as a touchstone, a benchmark (if sometimes of questionable merit where he himself was concerned). Son of a political writer and a novelist, he spent his early years in France, to which he returned after studying at the University of Copenhagen. From 1822 to 1825 he was an influential Professor of Danish Language at Kiel University, publishing lectures on Danish/Norse themes. He wrote vaudeville, serious plays and poetry, much of it satirical. He was editor of Flyvende Post (1827–30), which published Andersen when young, Interimsblade (1834–37) and Intelligensblade (1842–43). In 1831 he married Johanne Luise Pätges (1812–90), the greatest Danish actress of her day and a friend of Andersen's, like him from a poor background, and, like him too, a protégée of Jonas Collin.

48. The print run of the self-published Journey on Foot, 500 copies, sold out speedily, and C.A. Reitzel then agreed on Andersen's original terms to issue a second edition. Y by Y 1829.

49. See Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, A Literary Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. See also much of Chapter 2 of this study.

50. E.T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822). See the introduction, text and notes to The Golden Pot and Other Tales edited by Ritchie Robertson. Oxford University Press, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1992.

51. See the introduction by Leopold von Loewenstein-Wertheim to his translation of Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl's. London: Oneworld Classics, 2008, and Chapter 2 passim of this study.

52. Johan de Mylius, HCA et livs digtning. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2005, p. 117.

53. Love on St Nicholas's Tower was premièred on 25 April 1829 and ran for three performances only. Frederick J. Marker (op. cit.) amusingly juxtaposes conflicting reports by critics for the Royal Theatre (pp. 34–35), one saying ‘It is high time to stop the boyish foolishness that more and more dominates our stage’, another saying ‘the fine, flowing verse, and the vigorous action throughout speak in its favour … one of our best vaudevilles’. Unfortunately, in this instance, the negative opinion won.

54. Marker, op. cit. p. 62.

55. The Bride of Lammermoor had its first night on 5 May 1832 and ran for eight performances. Elaborately staged in Gothic style using a moonrise machine and a ‘Eidophusikon’ to show thunderclouds passing over the moon, it was generally judged a success. Ivar Bredal was a viola player who had by this time written a ‘potpourri’ for his instrument with orchestral accompaniment. From 1835 he was concertmaster at the Royal Chapel, and from 1849 to 1863 choirmaster at the Royal Theatre. Despite Weyse's considerable fame and Andersen's friendship with him, The Bride's successor, The Feast at Kenilworth, pleased the librettist far less; he was angry that Weyse insisted on a happy ending with Amy Robsart united with Leicester. Even so, the opera – première 6 January 1836, seven performances – was very well received, Weyse was declared to have produced a masterpiece and Andersen's libretto was also praised.

56. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, edited by John Lucas. London: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 306.

57. Commodore Peter Frederik Wulff (1774–1842). Distinguished naval officer, rising to admiral and chief of the annual naval cadet ships, he was engaged in significant strategic engagements, not least in seeing off British warships. His happy marriage to Henriette Weinholdt stimulated his interest in artistic matters, and he opened his doors early to the young Andersen, making him feel at home. His disabled daughter Henriette Wulff (1804–1854) became a greatly beloved friend of Andersen's and remained so until her tragic death on a ship bound for America. Wulff took over the translations of Shakespeare from the actor Peter Thun Foersom, and from 1818 to 1825 produced Volumes 6–9.

58. John Sutherland The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 220. For the impact of Scott's novels on Denmark, see the essay by Jørgen Erik Nielsen, ‘His pirates had foray'd on Scottish hill’ (Danish reception of Scott) in Reception of Walter Scott in Europe, edited by Murray Pittock. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007.

59. Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor premièred on 26 September 1835 in Andersen's beloved Teatro San Carlo, Naples.

60. D p. 181, and for Andersen's rereading of the novel (17 May 1849) ibid. p. 212.

61. D p. 196.

62. ‘Galoshes of Fortune’. This delightful story of galoshes that transport a person wearing them to the largely incongruous times and places of their expressed wishes appeared in Tre Digtninger (Three Pieces of Writing) in 1838. The title of the story has passed into common Danish usage to signify a happy reversal.

63. Nussknacker und Mausekönig appeared in Vol. I of Hoffmann's Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brothers) in 1819.

64. ‘top Danish novelist’. See Y by Y January 1836 and Chapter 6: Only a Fiddler, note 1.

65. Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian’. London: Everyman edition, 1906, pp. 61–62.

66. Ibid. p. 249.

67. Ibid. p. 425.

68. Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). Born into a Jewish family in the Rhineland, with rich family connections but not rich himself, and rejected by the girl with whom he was in love, Heine turned his feelings of outsider status, his longings for love and inclusion on the one hand, and his contempt for moral dishonesty and timid bourgeois values on the other, into the ravishing poems of his young manhood – his first collection, Gedichte, in 1822, with his Buch der Lieder, 1827 clinching his growing reputation. In 1824 he went on a walking tour of north Germany and then of the Harz, which provided the material for his Reisebilder (see Chapter 2). Friendly with leading intellectuals in Berlin, some of whom – Alexander von Humboldt, Chamisso – Andersen would meet himself, Heine was sufficiently disappointed in the state of Germany and his life there, and enough encouraged by news of the July Revolution in Paris, to move to the French capital in 1831, where he stayed for the rest of his life. This is the Heine that Andersen read raptly as a young man, emulated in his own verses and travelogue, and eventually had significant conversations with in Paris.

69. Orla Lehmann (1810–70), so strongly identified with the Danish National Liberal Party and the concept of Denmark's inviolability (the country's southern frontier being the Eider River), was in fact half German, his father being a Holsteiner. (Hence his easy familiarity with German poetry, especially Heine.) His family were friends of Oehlenschläger and H.C. Ørsted. Studying law at Copenhagen University, he entered radical politics early, contributing to the liberal Kjøbenhavnsposten and for three years (1839–42) co-editing Fædrelandet. He was imprisoned for three months for intemperate radicalism, and was prominently involved with the protests of 1848. He entered the Cabinet in 1848, but resigned the same year out of impatience with the speed of reform. He held positions in the new constitutional Danish Parliament from 1851 to the year of his death, 1870, being Danish Minister of the Interior 1861–63. Liberal in every respect, including supporting women's rights, he was so committed to the Danish position over Schleswig-Holstein that the country's loss of the Double Duchy in 1864 made him bitter, even pessimistic. In 1864 he wrote a widely read study of the issue, Om Aarsagerne til Danmarks Ulykke: et historisk Tilbageblik (On the Causes of Denmark's Misfortunes: A Historical Retrospect).

70. MF-TL p. 90.

71. Andersen has contracted the actual lines in his quotation from this poem in ‘Die Nordsee’ section of Heine's Buch der Lieder. It should read: ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!/Sei mir gegrüßt, Du ewiges Meer!’ ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!/Give me greetings, you eternal sea!’

72. Initially, Digte was surprisingly generously received by critics, for all its glaring mistakes, even eliciting a review in the prestigious Maanedsskrift for Litteratur (Monthly Review of Literature).

73. Christian den Andens Dvarf (Christian II's Dwarf) probably dates from as early as 1825, though he went on writing it until at least 1829. It was posthumously published in Anderseniana 3, Odense, 1935, pp. 59–111.

74. The relevant letters for 13 July 1830, 14 July 1830, 22 July 1830 and 28 July 1830 can be read in Breve (Letters) on www.andersen.sdu.dk. They also – in modern Danish – are included in Johan de Mylius, HCA en livs digtning, pp. 168–174. All the quotations here are taken in original Danish from the sdu online collection.

75. Fåborg (Faaborg): Lone Mouritsen, Roger Norum and Caroline Osborne, Rough Guide to Denmark, London: Rough Guides/Penguin Books, 2010, pp. 172–174. The Voigt family were eminent rich merchants there.

76. MF-TL p. 89.

77. Phantasier og Skizzer (Fantasies and Sketches), published 10 January 1831 at Andersen's own expense.

78. Henrik Hertz (1798–1870) was a Danish poet and playwright particularly associated with J.L. Heiberg. His Gjengangerbreve (Letters from a Ghost), published anonymously in December 1830 (though authorship was known in literary circles), mockingly attacked Andersen for lacking the formal qualities in his poetry that the Heiberg circle demanded. Hertz enjoyed a successful literary career. His novel Stemninger og Tilstande (Moods and Conditions, 1839) allegedly features Kierkegaard, and his romantic drama Kong Renés Datter (1845) in the translation of T. Martin as King René's Daughter (1850) was very well received in England.

79. MF-TL pp. 91–92.

Chapter 2: Germany 1831 and After

1. MF-TL p. 92.

2. HCA, The True Story of My Life, p. 63.

3. MF-TL pp. 93–94.

4. MF-TL p. 92

5. There were four Reisebilder, each volume blending original poems, often ones now important in the poet's oeuvre, into the prose: Volume I, Die Harzreise (Journey to the Harz), 1826; Volume II, Die Nordsee (The North Sea), 1827; Volume III, Die Reise von München nach Genua (Journey from Munich to Genoa) and Die Bader von Lucca (The Baths of Lucca), 1830; Volume IV, Die Stadt Lucca (The City of Lucca) and Englische Fragmente (English Fragments), 1831.

6. D p. 24.

7. It cannot be definitely asserted that the Christian mentioned in the Diaries is Riborg's brother, but in the context – Christian was in Andersen's confidence about his love for his sister and an admired friend in his own right, and the other companions cited in the seeing-off include Orla Lehmann (see Chapter 1 note 69) from Fyn – it seems far more likely than not.

8. SP pp. 27–28.

9. Ibid. p. 28.

10. Ibid. p. 29.

11. Ibid. p. 111.

12. Ibid. p. 56 and Heinrich Heine, Selected Verse, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p. 30.

13. Jens Andersen HCA pp. 163–180; and for letter p. 167, Tiina Nunnally's translation capturing the tone of the original incomparably well.

14. SP pp. 35–43.

15. Heine's rather caustic observations on Goslar, which he thought had been overrated by guidebooks, did not go unnoticed by its residents. Andersen, who went there metaphorically armed with Heine's travelogue, records, ‘worthy citizens of Goslar … always looked glum when I mentioned Heine.’ SP p. 60. This is understandable, considering the acidity of Heine's prose account of the place.

16. Both the achievement and the influence of Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857) can scarcely be overestimated; he is widely accredited as the opener-up of the Norwegian landscape for serious artists. Born in Bergen of humble parentage (into a fishing family), he was given financial help to complete his artistic studies at the Copenhagen Academy, and here he first appreciated, through attention to the Dutch artist Ruisdael, his own inclination towards landscape painting. In 1824 he became a professor at the Academy at Dresden, the city he made his home for the rest of his life. In Dresden he enjoyed the friendship not only of Tieck (celebrated in Andersen's travelogue) but of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), though the two men, personally so close to each other, disagreed about the relation of science to art. For all their Romantic qualities, Dahl's Danish and Norwegian landscapes pay great attention to geographical accuracy and to the effects of history and culture on the scene being depicted. Among Dahl's many students were Norwegians Thomas Fearnley and Peder Balke (1804–87), who specialised in Norway's more intractable mountain- and seascapes, Dahl made regular visits back to Norway and was a co-founder of the Norwegian National Gallery. See Christopher Riopelle with Sarah Herring, Forests, Rocks, Torrents: Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde Collection. London: National Gallery Company, distributed by Yale University Press, 2011.

17. J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of Europe. London: Penguin, 1996, pp. 400–410.

18. SP, 45.

19. Ibid. p. 102.

20. Heine, Selected Verse, op. cit., p. 6.

21. We have noted in Chapter 1 the immense influence of this complex-structured fantasy, anchored in a specific place (Dresden) on Andersen. Hoffmann did not actually move to Dresden until 1813, and left the following year. See Ritchie Robertson's introduction and chronology to The Golden Pot and Other Tales, Oxford: World's Classics, 1992.

22. Ibid pp. 2–3.

23. SP p. 136.

24. Ibid. p. 135.

25. Ibid. p. 146.

26. Ibid. p. 149.

27. Ibid. p. 156.

28. Matthias Claudius (1740–1815) was a successful, productive poet, a journalist and an editor, with a special link to Denmark, where he worked as secretary to Graf Holstein in Copenhagen (1764–65) and later – from 1785 on – received a Danish pension. He was a friend of Herder and Goethe.

29. Ibid. p. 27.29. The librettist was Johann Friedrich Kind (1768–1843) and Andersen's travelogue contains a fuller tribute to his imagination and relationship to the ‘Teufelsbrücke’ (Devil's Bridge’) gorge in SP pp. 128–130. Andersen adds a verse commentary of his own on Der Freischütz (1821), which exercised a great pull on his mind as it did on so many of his contemporaries. (In London three theatres simultaneously staged performances.) It has been generally considered, not least by Richard Wagner himself, the masterpiece that initiated German Romantic opera.

30. Smollett, dissimilar as his temperament largely was to Andersen's, felt, as the Dane regularly did, the need to leave the country in which his books first appeared because of controversy and (as he felt) inadequate appreciation (despite also enjoying considerable success). At 42 he transferred his wife and household to France and Italy, and then, after an unsatisfying return to Britain, left again for Italy, where he died at his house near Livorno in 1771. Perhaps the youthful Andersen sensed, and already recognised in himself, something of this irritable restlessness. Andersen would have read Smollett's novels in the translations made from English by Johan Clemens Tode (1736–1806).

31. His nephew, Jeremy Melford, perhaps the novel's most sympathetic character, writes: ‘My uncle is an odd kind of humourist, always on the fret … his being tortured by the gout may have soured his temper, and, perhaps, I may like him the better on further acquaintance…’ Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker. London: Penguin Classics, 2008, p. 36. He does, and his readers with him.

32. SP p. 46.

33. Ibid. p. 29.

34. Ibid. p. 86.

35. Ibid. p. 87.

36. Ibid. p. 47.

37. Ibid. p. 47.

38. Ibid. p. 61.

39. Heinrich Heine, Travel Pictures, translated by Peter Wortsman. New York: Archipelago, 2008, p. 28.

40. SP p. 42.

41. Ibid. p. 68.

42. Heinrich Heine, Travel Pictures, op. cit., p. 25.

43. Hoffmann's Nutcracker, see Chapter 6, note 56.

44. SP p. 139.

45. This novel's first person narration, as of an autobiographer telling us his emotional life, can be seen as a progenitor of Andersen's The Improvisatore, if of a less marked nature than Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. Incest is there, in that the hero becomes engaged to a girl who turns out to be his sister.

46. It is worth noting that the first volume contains two fairy-tale plays (Märchendramen), one of which the lively, humorous Der Gestiefelte Kater (literally The Booted Cat, but we know it as Puss-in-Boots) is intended for children, and takes the ingenious form of a play within a play.

47. For a fuller plot summary, see Henry and Mary Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1976, pp. 238–239.

48. This view of him has lasted: e.g. Lord David Cecil speaks of Scott as sharing Shakespeare's sense of what is truly, rather than obviously, heroic. ‘So also in the work of Scott, the novelist likest to Shakespeare, the humble Highland gillie Evan outshines the lordly head of the clan.’ Lord David Cecil, Library Looking-Glass. London: Constable, 1975, p. 118.

49. Novalis (1772–1801) the pseudonym of Friedrich, Freiherr von Hardenburg, son of the Director of the Saxon Salten Mines in which business the poet himself worked. This was after university studies in Jena and Leipzig, where he became friendly with the literary critic/pundit Friedrich Schlegel and deeply influenced by Kant and Fichte. His personal life then took an extraordinary turn, inextricable from his art and subsequent reputation: he fell in love (in November 1794 – it can be precisely dated) with 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn who, some months later, contracted pulmonary tuberculosis. Novalis did all he could to effect a cure, but she died in 1797, as did a loved younger brother. The tragedies precipitated a crisis from which the poet emerged with a religious vision of his own, developed in remarkable works of literary art: Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns of the Night, 1799) begotten by his double bereavement, the visionary extended prose-poems, Die Lehringe zu Sais (The Novices of Sais, 1800), and the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen in which appears the symbol of the Blue Flower, so meaningful to subsequent Romantic poets. Schlegel and Tieck, as close friends, were responsible for collecting and editing his work after his early death (also from tuberculosis).

50. Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). As with Novalis, it was Ludwig Tieck who was responsible for the posthumous collected works of his friend, whose life had been a strained and difficult one with a tragic, if self-sought, ending. From an old military family, Kleist was both involved in, and repelled by, military life. A student of the works of philosophy of Kant and Fichte, he reacted against the faith in the future associated with the Aufklärung, and both his restless life – which included joining Napoleon's army when it was preparing to invade England, and later trying to join in a Prussian plot against Napoleon – and his works in several genres display a dark reading of man's ability to control his impulses or, by extension, his destiny. In drama his greatest work is his last, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1810), in the novel his proto-modernist novellas, Michael Kolhaas and Die Marquise von O. … (also 1810) and Der Zweikampf (The Duel, 1811). His friend Henriette Vogel asked him to kill her to spare her sufferings from a terminal illness; he shot her and then himself by the Wannsee, near Berlin.

51. Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) and his elder brother August (1767–1845) were distinguished intellectuals, associated with the University of Jena, and with the definition of the Romantic, especially through the journal Das Athenäum, which they edited.

52. SP pp. 49–50.

53. SP p. 144.

54. ‘And then – as always, in this extraordinary year [1840] – Schumann celebrated by working out another set of songs. This time, he drafted in the afternoons of just two days (11 and 12 July) his masterpiece for the female voice, the solo cycle Frauenliebe und Leben (Op. 42), in which a woman sings of her love and her loss. He set three more songs in the two days following (Op. 31); and then, between 16 and 18 July, in another astonishing rush of work he completed four more songs, the set of translations by Chamisso of four Hans Christian Andersen texts published as Op. 40.’ John Worthen, Robert Schumann Life and Death of a Musician. New Haven and London: Yale, 2007.

55. Jackie Wullschlager HCA p. 105. Her lively rendering of the correspondence cannot be bettered.

56. Ibid. p. 106.

57. Ibid. pp. 108–109.

58. The locus classicus for these major features of Norse mythology is The Prose Edda (written before 1223) of Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). See Snorri Sturluson, translated with Introduction and notes by Jesse Byock. The Prose Edda, London: Penguin Classics, 2005, Ragnarök (also Ragnarökr) is briefly defined in its Glossary of Names, p. 172 as ‘Darkness or Twilight of the Gods’. A.S. Byatt has brilliantly woven the ancient accounts of this eschatological event with a memory of her youthful self trying to comprehend world war, wholescale destruction and ideas of ending, in Ragnarok. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011.

59. Glossary definition in Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, London: Penguin Classics, 2005, p. 161, ‘Gimle (Gimlé: Protected from Fire) place where the righteous men will live after death.’

60. Though Andersen probably later modified his enthusiasm for this seminal Danish cleric, thinker and reformer, it will be remembered from Chapter 1 that he sent Grundtvig copies of his early poems.

61. Snorri Sturluson, op.cit., p. 71.

62. Ibid. p. 28.

63. Jens Andersen HCA pp. 143–147.

64. In conversation with the author.

65. See Marker, op.cit., especially pp. 42–43 and 78–83.

66. Ibid., especially pp. 44–45. Essentially ‘an adaptation of Carlo Gozzi's play Il corvo (The Crow, 1761)’, a work much admired by E.T.A Hoffmann, the ‘production of The Raven in October 1832 was [notable] for its fine score by Denmark's foremost romantic composer, J.P.E Hartmann’ (1805–1900). In a significant six-page review in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (1840) of the publication by Musikforeningen of piano selections from The Raven, Robert Schumann warmly praised both Hartmann's music and Andersen's text: ‘While all of Hartmann's music is permeated by depictions of the sea, The Raven in particular can basically be called an opera of the sea. Violent storms and ocean waves were vividly portrayed in Hartmann's score and in the staging.’ Students of Andersen's imaginative writings will be interested in the importance to the work of the mermaids' choric warnings.

67. J[ohan] P[eter] E[milius] Hartmann came from a musical Copenhagen family of German origin. Andersen's almost exact contemporary (born 14 May 1805), he produced his first symphony (in G minor Op. 17) in the same year (1835) as Andersen's first novel and first book of fairy tales. Founding the Danish Musical Association in 1836 and chairing it his whole long lifetime through, he stood at the very centre of Danish musical activity, though he also enjoyed close association with German composers. Another operatic collaboration with Andersen, Liden Kirsten (Little Kirsten) Op. 44, 1844–46, was to prove the most successful Danish opera of the century.

68. A delightful lyrical suite of poems, this was published on 18 December 1832 (though dated 1833), the edition, illustrated in black and white, being dedicated – and indeed handed over in person – to His Majesty King Frederik VI. The poems make use of dialogue and of articulations by characters suitable for the time of year – e.g. a young gentleman on horseback for April. In the verses for the Christmas month, December, Ingeborg Drewsen (née Collin)'s children (lifelong favourites of Andersen), Viggo and Jonna make appearances, as does Louise Collin. The first complete reprint of the sequence is in Johan de Mylius's edition of Samlede Digte (Collected Poems). Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2000.

69. Y by Y. Letter to Henriette Wulff, 16 February 1833.

70. Y by Y 1833/1834.

71. D p. 42.

72. Sven Hakon Rossel, Do You Know the Land, Where the Lemon Trees Bloom? Hans Christian Andersen and Italy. Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2009. This rich, rewarding book covers, with great attention to detail, all aspects of Andersen's relationship to Italy, showing the many Italian motifs recurrent in his works, and discussing plays and poems as well as novels and tales. Readers are directed to its chapter on Andersen's last Italian journey of 1872 as especially illuminating. Also recommended by Sven Hakon Rossel: Hans Christian Andersen: Danish Writer and Citizen of the World. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.

73. Thorvaldsen is inseparable from Andersen's reception of Italy, the kindness he showed him, the exceptional understanding of his social and professional position with its strong resemblance to his own of earlier years. Their friendship seems to have grown very quickly after their first meeting on 19 October 1833 (D p. 50). Four days later Thorvaldsen was one of those listening to Andersen read: ‘Thorvaldsen seemed delighted, praised the harmony, the beautiful verses and the central idea of the work; asked me to read it for him at my leisure’ (D, p. 54).

74. Hertz's attack on Andersen went on rankling for some time. In his diary for 22 September 1833 (D p. 47) he was writing, ‘Hertz is, so to speak, a kind of poetical tinsmith, a tinker, although I don't want to go so far as to say that he tried to pass off on Copenhageners his highly polished tinny piece as gold.’ So he was not best pleased to learn that Hertz was coming to Rome – he arrived on 21 November 1833 (Y by Y). But in fact he warmed to him, and they enjoyed each other's company, Hertz marvelling at Andersen's innocence – though the latter was intrigued and even titillated by Hertz's anecdotes and activities, this being especially true when the two of them were together in Naples in February 1834. But by 21 December 1833 he was recording: ‘Hertz quite the confidant this evening! Gossiped about the theatre management and lechery’ (D p. 62).

75. One of the invisible presiding spirits of The Improvisatore, in my view, and in his actual work as a painter, even more strongly of ‘The Ice Maiden’, as we shall see. We can, I believe, find something of Fearnley personally in the character of Bernardo in the first work, and, in the second, Andersen's intense, detailed yet atmospheric evocations of the Alps have a real correspondence to some of the artist's greatest works. For a fine survey and appreciation of Thomas Fearnley, his disposition as traveller and man of Europe, his Nordic background, his artistic ‘apprenticeship’ to Dahl, and his painterly discovery of, and homage to, Italian, Norwegian, English (he was hailed as a man of ‘genius’ on his 1836–38 visit to England, painting the Lake District with especial enthusiasm), and Swiss landscapes, see In Front of Nature: The European Landscapes of Thomas Fearnley, edited by Ann Sumner and Greg Smith. London: The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham in association with D. Giles Ltd, 2012. There we can also get a picture of the man himself: ‘this most avuncular and sociable of men’ (ibid., p. 20), ‘a serious artist who brought pleasure and a sense of well-being wherever he went. A man whose endearing qualities transcended boundaries, just as his work found popularity across the continent, making him in every sense a truly European artist.’ These words could apply to Andersen too. But, unlike Andersen, ‘well-being’ went in Fearnley's case with a lively appreciation of the sensual, the carnal, and, like Hertz, he was positively worried by Andersen's virginal ways and thought he ought to be taken in hand. Andersen records for Christmas Eve 1833, ‘Fearnley talked to Thorvaldsen about seducing me, about my innocence’ (D pp. 63–64).

Chapter 3: The Improvisatore

1. D p. 65.

2. D p. 59.

3. Georgina Masson, The Companion Guide to Rome. London: Collins, 1965, pp. 41–42.

4. D p. 59.

5. See Avriel Goldberger, ‘Introduction’ to Madame de Staël, Corinne or Italy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987, pp. xxix–xxx.

6. ‘Fata morgana’ is a term for a mirage or illusion, especially on the sea, deriving from the Italian attribution of the phenomenon to the fairy Morgan le Fay, thought to be responsible for its appearance on the Straits of Messina. It has haunted many writers; in the 20th century. Eudora Welty called the Mississippi community in The Golden Apples (1949) ‘Morgana’ because of the illusions that dominate the lives of its inhabitants.

7. D p. 65.

8. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1895 version), lines 305–306.

9. See Henry and Mary Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976, p. 238–239 for a detailed plot summary.

10. Imp p. 33.

11. Poems of Robert Browning 1842–1864. London: Oxford University Press, ‘The World's Classics’, 1907, pp. 88–89.

12. Imp p. 133.

13. Imp p. 134.

14. Imp pp. 117–118.

15. Imp p. 133.

16. David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy. London: Allen Lane, 2011, especially pp. 137–147.

17. Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia (eds), British Romanticism and Italian Literature. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2005, p. 176 ff.

18. Imp p. 182.

19. Ibid. p. 182.

20. David Gilmour, op. cit., p. 143.

21. D p. 75.

22. Andersen pays tribute to her in MF-TL p. 161.

23. ‘Under the Willow-tree’ (1853), rather diffusely made up of autobiographical elements and inspired (a little too obviously) by Andersen's relationship to Jenny Lind, centres on a young man, Knud, a cobbler by trade, who, as a boy in Køge, had fallen in love with his girl playmate, and maintained his love for her even after she had moved to nearby Copenhagen and already launched herself on her acting career. Johanne, though warmly disposed to him, feels for him as a sister feels for a brother. Learning this, Knud chooses not to stay in Denmark but instead travels on the Continent, working at his trade in various German cities. Eventually he comes to Milan and, after three peaceful industrious years there, is taken to the theatre and sees Johanne, the performance's incontrovertible star and, according to gossip, soon to make a society marriage. Knud forthwith journeys back to Denmark, but dies in winter snows, dreaming of a wedding to his loved one, before he reaches his homeland.

24. D p. 73.

25. Imp p. 184.

26. Imp p. 206.

27. Imp p. 219.

28. Thomas Fearnley also honoured both Vesuvius and Capri in some of his finest canvases. See the magnificent oil painting Night View of Vesuvius Erupting, 1834, reproduced in In Front of Nature: The European Landscapes of Thomas Fearnley, edited by Ann Sumner and Greg Smith. London: The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham in association with D. Giles Ltd, 2012 p. 101. This brings Andersen's prose to mind. For Capri, look at View at Capri (the Marina Piccola) 1833 (ibid. p. 45) and Coast Scene, tentatively identified as Capri, 1833–34 (ibid. p. 47).

29. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, translated by Jonathan Galassi. London: Penguin, 2010, p. 286.

30. Ibid. p. 306.

31. Ibid. p. 308.

32. Andersen based this fable about the ubiquitous craftiness of Cupid on a poem by the Greek lyricist Anacreon (6th century BCE). The poet taken by surprise by the naughty boy's arrow is surely a projection of the author himself (who, at that time particularly, had good reason to think of himself as a poet) as a kindly, cautious, elderly man.

Chapter 4: O.T.

1. O.T. p. 17.

2. O.T. p. 10.

3. O.T. p. 11.

4. Jens Andersen HCA p. 208.

5. O.T. p. 37.

6. The friendship between Arkady and Bazarov, between the essentially easy-going son of the gentry and his fellow student, a self-proclaimed nihilist, forms the axis of the novel and its most resonant metaphor. The two young men, who get on splendidly, provide significant contrasts in their attitudes to the opposite sex and love, to parents, to science and art, and to the future of their own society.

7. Far more even than his decidedly self-punishing obsession with Estella does Pip's relationship to his contemporary Herbert Pocket stand for the discrepancies within Victorian society. It shows how affection and common sense (and the firm good nature of one of the pair) help these to be borne and overcome. Herbert Pocket is an unflagging friend to Pip when faced with Magwitch; Vilhelm is never permitted the chance to be as helpful to Otto over his socially embarrassing connections.

8. O.T. p. 11.

9. This whole exchange to be found in O.T. p. 25.

10. O.T. p. 70.

11. O.T. p. 72.

12. O.T. p. 101.

13. O.T. p. 102.

14. O.T. p. 116.

15. O.T. p. 136.

16. O.T. p. 137.

17. O.T. p. 231.

18. D p. 96.

19. Jens Andersen HCA pp. 390–395.

20. Ibid. p. 391, with diary entry 8 February 1842. ‘When I came home I found a letter from my mother's daughter; I experienced what I had described in O.T.

21. O.T. p. 247.

22. Osvald says in Ghosts that everything he has painted turns on ‘Livsglæden. Altid og bestandig om Livsglæden.’ ‘The joy in life. Always and without exception the joy in life.’ And the word is taken up by his own mother, who realises what has been absent from the conventional Norwegian life around her.

23. O.T. p. 251.

24. O.T. p. 132.

25. O.T. p. 256.

26. O.T. p. 98.

27. O.T. p. 99.

28. O.T. p. 101.

29. O.T. p. 102.

30. O.T. p. 156.

31. The sensational success of Hernani was seemingly self-perpetuating, objectors and enthusiasts loudly interrupting its first hundred performances often to the point of making the actors inaudible. The eponymous Hernani is a Spanish outlaw whose rival for the hand of Donna Sol de Silva is, among others, none other than Don Carlos, later King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. After scenes of romantic excitement and clamorous verse, Hernani and Donna Sol achieve a Liebestod.

32. O.T. p. 255.

33. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, translated by Catherine Slater, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1991, p. 26.

Chapter 5: Eventyr, Fortalte for Børn (Fairy-Tales told for Children)

1. ‘Fyrtøiet’ E og H Vol I p. 1.

2. ‘Das Blaue Licht’, ‘The Blue Light’ in the Brothers Grimm, Kinder-und Hausmärchen, 1815 and 1857. Here the soldier is, at least initially, a far more overtly sympathetic character than Andersen's, actually spurned (in so many words) by the king he has served, and then in his distress throwing himself on the witch's mercy afterwards. Again the witch herself is more thoroughly unkind, playing deceitful, malicious tricks on the young man. When the soldier has gained the lamp and the little man who emanates from it, he wants the wicked woman tried properly in a law court; her subsequent death, by hanging from the gallows, is none of his doing. But when he comes to the capital city he displays a thirst for revenge on the King far more explicit than anything in ‘The Tinder Box’. The King's daughter will be his maidservant. The little man from the blue lamp grants him his wish, and this is only thwarted – the trick with the peas failing as in Andersen – by the shoe the princess has left behind being found in the soldier's room. As later in Andersen, the soldier is thrown into jail, and then appeals out of the cell window to a passer-by, in this case a comrade, to retrieve his bundle of possessions (with the lamp in it) from his lodgings. The soldier produces the lamp at the trial at which he has been condemned to death. Thanks to the little man, all the judiciary fall down, but the soldier yields to the King's pleas for mercy, on the condition (which is met) that he gets his kingdom and his daughter in marriage. Two good new English versions are to be found in Grimm, The Juniper Tree and Other Tales, translated by Anthea Bell. London: Pushkin Press, 2011, pp. 235–241 and Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm translated by Peter Wortsman. New York: Archipelago Books, 2013, pp. 120–125.

3. Tatar AA p. 157.

4. E og H Vol 1 p. 6.

5. Ibid. p. 6.

6. Ibid. p. 7.

7. Ibid. p. 9.

8. D p. 15.

9. ‘Clumsy Hans’. Clumsy Hans has two wonderfully clever older brothers who decide to enter the competition set by the king's daughter: she will take as husband the man who has most to say to her. The two young men set out on fine horses to present themselves but, to their scorn, Clumsy Hans insists on going with them, mounted on a goat, to enter the contest. While his brothers are preparing their witty speeches, Hans is finding odd, seemingly insignificant, things on the roadway: a dead crow, a discarded broken shoe, the best kind of mud… The princess receives her suitors in an overheated room with aldermen and clerks to hand, to write everybody's amusing words down. She explains that the heat is caused by her father roasting chickens. All the young men, including Hans's two brothers, become tongue-tied on hearing this, but not so Hans himself. He says he will roast his dead crow alongside the chickens, will cook it in the shoe that has a tin heel he can use as pot-handle, and he will use some of the mud as sauce. The rest of the mud he flings at the officious aldermen who don't respect him. He wins the princess.

10. ‘What Father Does …’ A happily married farmer decides that he must sell or barter their horse, and his wife agrees, because she believes that whatever he decides will be the right course. He swaps the horse for a cow, the cow for a sheep, the sheep for a large goose, the goose for the toll-keeper's clucking hen, the hen for a sack full of rotten apples (to feed pigs with). On this last he makes a bet with two Englishmen, who have been observing the transaction, that his wife will not be furious with him when he gets home. In fact she herself has been through a chain of swaps to make her husband an omelette on his return, and, for her own reasons, is happy to have the sack of rotten apples. The two Englishmen very happily hand over the money they now owe him, which is quite a tidy sum – so all's well that ends well if your wife really loves and admires you. Andersen presents the story as one he had heard when a little boy.

11. Jackie Wullschlager in her notes for Hans Christian Andersen Fairy-Tales, translated by Tiina Nunnally, edited and introduced by herself. London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 424.

12. Paul Binding, Imagined Corners: Exploring the World's First Atlas. London: Hodder Headline, 2003, pp. 48–50.

13. ‘Dødningen’, ‘The Ghost’ is a prose story with the same plot as ‘The Travelling Companion’, which Andersen inserted into Digte (Poems), published on 2 January 1830.

14. ‘Thumbelina’, for all its coy sound thanks to the musical Hans Christian Andersen, is in fact as good a rendering of the Danish ‘Tommelise’ as you could have, the Danish for ‘thumb’ being tommelfinger.

15. Ancient Greek used the word ‘psyche’ to connote both the soul and the butterfly, for obvious reasons – its metamorphosis through caterpillar and chrysalis, its beauty, its ascent.

16. E og H Vol I p. 63.

17. This classic children's book (Part One 1906, Part Two 1907) by the Swedish Andersen-admirer Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) describes the adventures of a 14-year-old boy, Nils Holgersson, who because of his malicious conduct to an elf is metamorphosed into a midget. Trying to stop the farm gander from joining a migrating flock of wild geese, Nils jumps on its back, forgetting his stature, and thus makes a journey all the way up to the north of Sweden and back, learning the ways of birds and animals, and achieving a new compassionate moral sense as a result. His nickname among the geese is ‘Tummetott’ – tumme being the Swedish for thumb. A timely new and complete translation of Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through Sweden by Peter Graves, was published by Norvik Press, London in 2013.

18. E og H Vol 1 pp. 68–71.

19. Denmark's Lutheran Church retained the books of the Apocrypha, of which The Book of Tobit is one as part of the scriptural canon, unlike the Calvinists who rejected them.

20. E og H Vol I p. 68.

21. Ibid. p. 69.

22. In the very first moments of A Doll's House, Helmer playfully (and insensitively) likens his wife to a skylark and a squirrel, and the imagery persists, signifying that his possessive domestication of her is the same living death that captivity would mean for these wild creatures.

23. The Oxford Ibsen Vol. VII,edited by James Walter McFarlane. London: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 62.

24. Ibid. p. 450.

25. Ibid. p. 449.

26. Jens Andersen HCA pp. 497–499.

27. See especially the whole of Act III of this masterpiece, with Alfred Allmers's accounts of his enlightenment up in the lonely mountains.

28. The Oxford Ibsen Vol VII, op. cit. pp. 449–450.

29. Katharine Briggs, Dictionary of Fairies, London: Allen Lane, 1976, pp. 287–289.

30. E og H Vol I p. 109.

31. Fouqué was also the author of a mythological trilogy, Der Held des Nordens (The Hero of the North, 1810), romantic plays in verse based on the Icelandic Eddas, which he read in the original. Fichte was the dedicatee.

32. Undine, translated by F.E. Bunnett. Milton Keynes: Lightning Source UK, 2011, p. 37.

33. Ibid. p. 42.

34. Ibid. p. 42

35. Ibid. p. 75.

36. Ibid. p. 84.

37. E og H Vol I p. 128.

38. Ibid. p. 130.

39. Ibid. p. 130.

40. See Tatar AA p. 120.

41. Heinrich Steinhöwel's Esopus, 1476, in Latin and German, is generally agreed to be the first inclusive scholarly compilation of Aesop in Europe.

42. Interestingly, Infante Don Juan Manuel also wrote a didactic novel he did not finish and an educational work for his own son, giving him advice on, among other matters, love.

43. Annette Madsen's essay is to be found in Johan de Mylius, Aage Jørgensen and Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen (eds), Hans Christian Andersen. A Poet in Time. Papers from the Second International Hans Christian Andersen Conference 29 July to 2 August 1996, Odense: Odense University Press, 1999.

44. E og H Vol I p. 136.

45. Ibid. p. 135.

46. Ibid. p. 141.

47. These two poems of Wordsworth's are placed side by side in Lyrical Ballads, 1798. In ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ the child finally tells his father why he prefers Liswyn farm to ‘Kilve by the green sea’; it is because the first has a weathercock that fascinates him. The little girl in ‘We Are Seven’ refuses to make a distinction between her living siblings and her deceased ones. The closing stanza of the first of the pair is particularly apt for the Romantic/early 19th-century evaluation of the wisdom of the uncorrupted child: ‘Oh dearest, dearest boy! My heart/For better lore would seldom yearn,/Could I but teach the hundredth part/Of what from thee I learn.’

48. E og H Vol I p. 141.

Chapter 6: Kun en Spillemand (Only a Fiddler) and ‘Den Standhaftige Tinsoldat’ (‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’)

1. Y by Y 1836.

2. Y by Y 1836.

3. Jens Andersen HCA pp. 340–342.

4. KES p. 9.

5. Ibid.

6. Svendborg, now linked to the islands by a bridge, is virtually a recurrent character in the novel. The larger of the two ports on the southern coast of Fyn, it has a thriving, lively feel to it; see The Rough Guide to Denmark, London, 2010.

7. KES p. 62.

8. KES p. 78.

9. KES p. 273.

10. Knud V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark, translated by Ivan Hill and Christopher Wade. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 61–63.

11. KES p. 62.

12. For a full study, see Jesse Russell and Ronald Cohn, The Battle of Bornhöved (1813) – German spelling of the Danish name used – VSD (Book on Demand) Publishing, 2012.

13. Hugely influenced by the thought and writings of Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, the Nazarenes – also known as the Lukasbund or Lukasbrüder (the Brotherhood of St Luke) – were a group of German painters who believed in a return to the art and values of the German and Italian Primitives, revered Dürer and admired the earlier Raphael. Founded in Vienna in 1809 by Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869), a painter Andersen himself considered ‘probably the greatest painter of our day’, (D p. 63), and Franz Pforr (1788–1812) – a writer whose early death affected the group's development – they moved to Rome the following year (1810). Here they were joined by Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867) and resided for a while in a monastery. They interested themselves greatly in the art of fresco, Cornelius in particular striving for a revival of ambitious, publicly prominent painting (see his Last Judgement in Munich's Ludwigskirche). The affinities, both ideological and actual, with the group of the English Pre-Raphaelites (founded 1848) will be obvious even from this brief description.

14. Y by Y 1810. The little Jewish girl at Fedder Carsten's school in Odense especially for Jewish children who stands behind Naomi was called Sara Heimann.

15. KES p. 18.

16. Ibid. p. 19.

17. Ibid. p. 23.

18. Ibid. p. 60.

19. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was published in 1847. Perhaps Q.D. Leavis was the first to argue (in ‘A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights’, Lectures in America, 1969) that behind this great novel stands Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, and an attempt, never completely carried out by the author, to transpose it into northern English life at the turn of the 18th/19th centuries. Thus Heathcliff, brought back from Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw, is his son, the bastard he favours above his legitimate one, just as Shakespeare's Gloucester does his bastard Edmund. Hence he is Cathy's half-brother. The related themes of half-siblings and incest fascinated the 19th-century mind; the age became more determinedly respectable as society, under the pressures of progress and urbanisation, grew at once more tangled and more ruthlessly divided.

20. KES p. 30. In Greek mythology, Amphion was a musician who built the walls of Thebes by charming the stones into position with his (Orphic) lyre.

21. See Daniel M. Grimley, Grieg Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006. Emphasising the profound effect of Bull as musician and cultural icon for Grieg, Grimley draws attention to important ambivalences within Bull which apply not only to Grieg himself but also to Andersen in his double role of both promoter of Nordic (Danish) tradition and European innovator: ‘As a historical musical figure, Bull reflects many of the tensions and oppositions within the idea of a Norwegian musical identity. His career as a virtuoso classical violinist placed him very much within a cosmopolitan context as a touring international professional. From this perspective his interest in Norwegian folk music was simply another form of exoticism. … But his enthusiasm for French revolutionary politics and his direct support of folk musicians … also had a catalysing influence on folklorism in Norway itself, where Bull was increasingly seen as a national hero’ (p. 35).

22. The letter from Andersen to Bull of 8 December 1838 is reproduced on Peter Sheppard Skærved's webpage: Ole Bull in H.C. Andersen's ‘Billedbog’, posted 16 October 2012. Address: www.peter-sheppard-skaerved.com.

23. Nøkken (Nøkk)/Nix/Nixie/Neck/Näck are all Germanic names found in Germany, the Nordic countries and Britain for a shape-shifting water spirit, usually male and related to the Kelpie and the Water Horse (who assumes humanoid disguises). Nøkken haunts lakes, streams and waterfalls and likes to play seductive music on the fiddle, principally to entice women and girls, not necessarily for malevolent purposes. See Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies. London: Allen Lane, 1976. Andersen, in linking Christian's godfather (and Ole Bull) to this spirit, is being entirely consistent with known folkloric beliefs.

24. KES p. 66.

25. Ibid. p. 103.

26. Ibid. p. 104.

27. For information and critical insight into Fredrika Bremer, see Sarah Death's translation and commentary on The Colonel's Family (in Swedish Familjen H***, 1831). Norwich: Norvik Press, 1995.

28. Jens Andersen HCA, p. 345, comments illuminatingly on the significance of the name, saying that the word Karreet (‘cart’) would have signalled her membership of the prostitute class to most Danish readers of the day.

29. KES p. 123.

30. Ibid. p. 125.

31. Ibid. p. 126.

32. Ibid. p. 43.

33. For English-language readers, From the Papers of One Still Living (ironically subtitled ‘Published Against His Will’) was included in Early Polemical Writings by Søren Kierkegaard, NJ edited and translated by Julia Watkin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

34. Op. cit. p. 99.

35. Ibid. p. 98.

36. Ibid. p. 99.

37. Ibid. p. 100.

38. KES p. 247.

39. O.T. p. 30.

40. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, translated by Catherine Slater. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1991, p. 195.

41. KES p. 156.

42. Ibid. pp. 187–188.

43. Ibid. p. 196.

44. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, translated and edited by Helen Constantine with an introduction by Patricia Duncker. London: Penguin Classics, 2005, p. xii.

45. Op. cit. p. 166.

46. KES p. 225.

47. MF-TL p. 171.

48. KES p. 247.

49. The first night was an enormous success with its audience; this included Frédéric Chopin, who declared Meyerbeer destined for immortality. The libretto of this first French ‘grand’ opera – set in medieval Sicily – was by the acclaimed and influential dramatist, Eugène Scribe (1791–1861). By citing Naomi's presence at this great occasion – which ushered in a tremendous run of successes for the work – Andersen is signalling Naomi's embrace of all that is triumphantly fashionable.

50. Possibly the creation of the celebrated international Danish choreographer Pierre Jean Laurent (1758–1831).

51. These two operas, written in succession, were, though Andersen could not have known it, the culmination of Rossini's life as an opera composer. Le Comte d'Ory, a comedy opera, dates from 1828, William Tell, a heroic one, from 1829. Born in 1792, Rossini lived until 1868. He wrote no operas but occasional pieces, including, for piano, a Stabat Mater (completed 1842) and a Petite Messe Solonelle in 1863.

52. Y by Y 1833 and 1841. Andersen's own first meeting with Victor Hugo was on 19 August 1833. His friendship with Alexandre Dumas (père) flourished in March and April 1841.

53. KES p. 257.

54. Ibid. p. 275.

55. E og H Vol I pp. 191–192.

56. E.T.A Hoffmann, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King included in The Nutcracker & The Strange Child, translated from the German by Anthea Bell. London: Pushkin Press, 2010, pp. 17–20.

57. E og H Vol I p. 193.

58. Ibid. p. 194.

59. Ibid. p. 196.

60. Ibid. p. 196.

61. Ibid. p. 196.

62. Thomas Mann, The Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1955, selected and translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975, p. 472.

Chapter 7: En Digters Bazar (A Poet's Bazaar)

1. EDB pp. 26–27.

2. Y by Y 1840.

3. EDB p. 26.

4. Ibid. p. 27.

5. Ibid. pp. 26–27.

6. This is amusingly both contradicted and confirmed by the anecdote Andersen tells (Chapter X) of seeing in a bookshop window a copy of The Improvisatore in German and going inside to ask the bookseller for a copy. He is handed a slim volume containing only the first part. When Andersen observes that the book isn't complete, the vendor assures him it is – and that modern writers (French writers, he cites) delight in not concluding their novels conventionally and leaving the readers to use their imagination. ‘Jeg har læst den!’ says the bookseller (EDB p. 43), ‘I have read it!’ ‘Men jeg har skrivet den!’ replies Andersen. ‘But I have written it!’

7. ‘Metalsvinet’ (‘The Bronze Pig’) forms Chapter III of Part Two ‘Italien’, ‘Italy’ of the travelogue, pp. 62–72. This is a somewhat sentimental story about an embryonic artist, a poor slum-boy, child of a harsh, slatternly mother forced by hunger into begging. Given to affectionately embracing the bronze cast of the statue of a pig, the latter comes to life to give the child a magical nocturnal tour of Florence. The tour includes the great monuments of the city's Renaissance culture, but nothing impresses the boy more than a painting by Agnolo Bronzino (1503–72) in the Uffizi, showing Christ surrounded by children as if to assure them they will all go to Heaven. Removed from his background, the beggar-boy is adopted by a glover and his wife, though the latter demonstrably prefers her pet pug Bellissima to him and is angry with the boy when he captures the dog in order to draw her. Befriended by an older artist – like Antonio in The Improvisatore – the boy grows up to be a great painter but dies young. His two best-known works, we are told, depict Bellissima and a ragged small boy leaning against the Bronze Pig.
The other two stories are ‘Venskapspakten’ (‘Friendship's Pact’), see note 40, and the extended prose-poem – or rhapsodic essay – in Part IV, ‘En Rose fra Homers Grav’, ‘A Rose from Homer's Grave’, which Andersen liked sufficiently to include with the other two in the first German edition of his Collected Stories, then in the Danish.

8. D p. 96.

9. Karl Gutzkov. Their mutual mounting literary fame apart, Gutzkov, as later shown, was an unlikely friend for Andersen to make. A radical by conviction from the lower ranks of society (his father was a groom), Gutzkov was inspired by the July Revolution of 1830 into a career of polemical journalism, with writings that provoked prosecution for blasphemy – his 1835 novel about an emancipated woman, Wally die Zweiflerin, and plays (18 in number) challenged political and social orthodoxies and often drew on his own complicated, sometimes hectic, sexual/emotional life, including a charged triangular relationship. He was a supporter of, though not an active participant in, the 1848 Revolution in Prussia, which provided the creative impetus and indeed the subject matter for a 9-volume novel of enormous ambition, Die Ritter vom Geiste (The Knights of the Spirit) which he believed marked a new departure for fiction, and is, by its admirers, seen as crucial to the German social novel. All in all, it is not surprising that he cared little for Andersen's writing, and when the two were both guests at the Danish aristocratic estate of Maxen, he was bold and unkind enough to tell him so. ‘Irked by Gutzkov,’ wrote Andersen on 18 June 1856 (D p. 245): ‘At the dinner-table Gutzkov tried to pick a quarrel with me about “Under the Willow-tree” – it was sentimental, forced; Christian [hero] was stupid; I had no understanding of children! I defended myself and said he hadn't understood the work or read it deeply enough.’ The two men seem to have made it up next day. Gutzkov's later years were marred by depression and paranoia.

10. Franz Liszt (1811–86). A prodigy, Liszt was playing the piano in public at the age of nine and was sent to Vienna to study. By the time Andersen met him, he had composed his still popular two piano concertos (No. 1, 1830, revised 1849; No. 2, 1839), lived in Paris, made three spectacularly successful tours of England, and had cohabited with the Comtesse d'Agoult, fathering three children by her, one of whom Cosima, would marry (1870) Richard Wagner as her second husband. Andersen was to get to know Liszt when he became a frequent visitor to Weimar, where the composer directed opera and gave and organised concerts, as well as pursuing his own work

11. Regiomontanus (1436–76), the name by which the great German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Müller became known. He settled in Nuremberg in 1471 where he acquired a rich patron, founded algebra and trigonometry as academic studies in Germany, and worked on the Alphonsine Tables and the Ephemeride, which Christopher Columbus consulted. He inspired the same admiration in Andersen that he had felt for his great countryman Tycho Brahe.

12. Hans Sachs (1494–1576). It was only to be expected that Andersen would have a fellow feeling for this extraordinarily creative man, accredited with 6,300 literary compositions. He was reared to be a shoemaker, and for five years practised his trade as an itinerant throughout Germany, then establishing himself as a cobbler back in his native Nuremberg, where he rose to become a master of his guild. He was also a youthful member of the Guild of Meistersingers, and his enormous output contains many Meisterlieder as well as probably 200 verse-dramas in many categories: tragedies, comedies and Fastnachtspiele (plays for Shrovetide). Like his friend Dürer, Sachs was a strong Protestant: his poem Die Wittenbergisch Nachtingall (The Wittenberg Nightingale) celebrates Luther; he wrote proselytising dialogues; and the poem he composed when he thought he was dying, Summa all meiner Gedicht (The Summa of all my Poetry, 1567), stresses the religious purpose of his creations. Interest in him was revived by Goethe, and he was apostrophised in Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (begun in 1848 but finished in 1868: The Mastersingers of Nuremberg).

13. Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). It is tempting in view of Andersen's great admiration for Dürer to see some correspondences between the two men, and to think that Andersen appreciated them. Both were masters of all forms of their art, and in both cases posterity has treasured their innovative contributions to a smaller-scale genre rather than the initially more acclaimed larger-scale ones, for all their acknowledged merits. Dürer's engravings Melancholia 1, St Jerome, The Knight, Death and the Devil and his woodcut Apocalypse have become part of the Western mind's treasury in much the same way as Andersen's best-known fairy tales have. Dürer was a man of wide curiosity and a great traveller, and he associated with many of the most distinguished men of his day, including Erasmus and Melanchthon, whose portraits he painted.

14. On 7 December 1835 the steam-hauled Bavarian Ludwig Railway was opened between Nuremberg and Fürth, and with it German railway history. The locomotive in use – ‘Adler’, (‘Eagle’) – was actually built in Britain, by Stephenson & Co. in Newcastle upon Tyne. It is pleasing to think that the first German railway, celebrated here, and the first of Andersen's fairy stories date from the same year.

15. See note 13 of Chapter 6, above; Cornelius's devotion to monumental public art was outstanding and trend-setting.

16. Enormously admired though his large-scale cartoon Hunnenschlacht (The Battle of the Huns) was, Kaulbach's fame has not survived his death in 1874. From 1849 he was Director of the Munich Academy of Art, and a son, a nephew and a great-nephew of his all became established painters.

17. ‘Engelen’ (‘The Angel’), first published separately on 11 November 1843, and then in Nye Eventyr. Første Bind. Første Samling (New Fairy Tales. First Volume, First Collection), 1844.

18. Mantua suffered repeatedly in the Napoleonic Wars, surrendering to the French for two years, being retaken by the Austrians, and then retaken in 1810 by Napoleon again before returning to Austrian control in 1814. Reaction against Austrian rule intensified in the 1840s, swelling to sustained revolt in 1851–1855, that was brutally put down. Andersen, therefore, in lighting on Mantua's feelings of unease is giving us a cameo of proto-Risorgimento Italy. Of course the city would have interested him for cultural reasons, as the birthplace of Virgil and seat of the Gonzaga family, patrons in the course of time of such major artists as Andrea Mantegna, and later the composer Monteverdi.

19. Y by Y 1840 and 1841.

20. EDB p. 88.

21. Ibid. p. 110. It is 6 January, Epiphany, celebrated in Italy – still – with the figure of La Befana, an old lady, distributing presents to children. Andersen, remembering his previous stay in Rome and literary tribute to the occasion, had expected to be delighted, but this time felt disgust. It shows perhaps a commendable maturing in Andersen as observer, no longer carried away by enthusiasm simply by being abroad.

22. In EDB he describes this charming-sounding ceremony as more comic than uplifting. The description actually uses many of the words of his diary entry for 17 January 1841. Though he thought the sight of the peasant boys seated near the tails of the donkeys about to be blessed to be picturesque, he didn't like their pricking an animal belonging to an old lady with long pins, hurting the poor creature so much that soldiers had to intervene. This must have reminded him of the cruelty of street-boys in many societies – for instance, those in Odense who had so teased his demented grandfather.

23. In fact The Moorish Girl, first night 18 December 1840, ran for only three performances. The whole episode of its poor reception and Andersen's attempt to justify himself and his creation in a printed apologia for it brought a renewal of ridicule down on the author's head. Frederick J. Marker, Hans Christian Andersen and the Romantic Theatre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971, judiciously concludes: ‘Separating evidence from outraged sensibilities, however, The Moorish Girl is clearly inferior to most of Andersen's other plays. Although the dramatist styled this five-act drama a “tragedy”, its theme and use of background music composed by Hartmann bring it closer to the category of conventional melodrama. Raphaella, a Spanish Saint Joan figure, who wins the love of the King of Cordova after saving his life in a battle against the Moors but who flees from his proposal of marriage on patriotic grounds, is basically a stock melodramatic heroine with “ugly duckling” overtones’ (p. 51).

24. This squib, ‘En Sjæl efter Døden’, ‘A Soul After Death’ appeared in J.L. Heiberg's Nye Digte (New Poems), available in December 1840, though officially not published until January 1841.

25. The first 20 stories of Billedbog uden Billeder had been published on 20 December 1839. ‘What the Moon Saw’ was (appropriately enough) the title under which the sequence appeared in English: What the Moon Saw and other Stories, translated by H.W. Dulcken. London: Routledge, 1866.

26. Billedbog uden Billede. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1845, pp. 3–4.

27. Ibid. pp. 5–6.

28. Ibid. pp. 11–12.

29. Ibid. pp. 49–51.

30. Ibid. pp. 13–15.

31. Ibid. pp. 23–25.

32. Ibid. pp. 39–41.

33. Harlequin (Arlecchino), Columbine (Colombina, ‘little dove’) and Pulcinella (anglicised as Punch) are all stock central characters in Italian 17th-century commedia dell’ arte and had a major bearing on Andersen's 1846 story ‘The Shadow’, in the commentary and notes on which further details about them will be found. Harlequin is the canny comic servant, Columbine his wife or mistress, of the upper servant order, who often aids her employer, the inamorata, in the pursuit of her love-object. Pulcinella is characterised by his large, unsightly nose and his attire mimetic of the conjunction of life and death, white garments surmounted by a face masked in black. Stravinsky made him the central figure in his eponymous ballet for Diaghilev of 1920, based on music by Pergolesi (or ascribed to him).

34. Constantin Hansen (1804–80). Though he grew up in Copenhagen, Hansen was actually born in Rome, the son of a Danish portrait-painter. His christening, though, took place in Vienna where Mozart's widow was his godmother. Family tragedy made establishing his career in his twenties a hard task, but, like Andersen himself, he received stipends to travel abroad, and became one of the best known of Denmark's Golden Age painters. He spent eight years in Italy altogether, associating with Bertel Thorvaldsen and Christen Købke among others. He married in 1846 and had thirteen children, five of whom died young, four as babies, one at the age of 19. His deep interest in nation-building Norse-based mythology informs his historical and public paintings.

35. Albert Küchler (1803–86). Born and educated in Copenhagen, Küchler went to Rome in 1830, and established himself as a member of the Scandinavian colony there, being popular and lively. His portrait of Andersen dates from Andersen's own sojourn in Rome (1833–34) and strongly conveys the impression of a sensitive, spiritually minded but determined young man. His own work at this time chiefly consisted of genre pictures of local life. In 1844 he became a Catholic convert, and eventually went to live in the San Bonaventura Monastery in Rome. Here he was visited by many of his compatriots, including fellow artists and members of the Danish royal family.

36. Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll (1800–51) a pre-eminent architect of the Danish Golden Age, responsible for one of Copenhagen's greatest monuments, the Thorvaldsens Museum (constructed 1838–48). Influenced by H.C. Ørsted, and himself a nephew of Jonas Collin, he went to Rome and joined the Scandinavian colony in 1834, also visiting Greece to study ancient architecture. Jonas Collin was one of the champions of his design for the museum, mooted as early as 1833. He served as Royal Buildings Inspector in Copenhagen in 1851.

37. Ditlev Conrad Blunck (1798–1853), a Golden Age Danish painter who, like Hansen, also celebrated the Scandinavian colony in Rome – in his painting (c.1836) Danish Artists on the Osteria La Gensola in Rome. Influenced by the Nazarenes, he increasingly turned to religious motifs. A homosexual scandal caused him to leave Denmark in 1841, never to return. A Holsteiner, he supported Schleswig-Holstein in the Three Years War.

38. For all details of the itinerary see Y by Y 1841.

39. Athens had suffered considerably as a city under Ottoman rule, and was largely chosen as capital of a free Greece because of its incomparable past. It probably had at the time about 12,000 inhabitants. Both the modest size and the squalor of many parts surprised visitors unfavourably. But when Andersen stayed there, the University (1837) had been built, and the National Gardens were open, while the National Library and Royal Palace under construction. Andersen's response to Athens is evoked in EDB pp. 175–221 and his rather rosy impression of the king pp. 204–207.

40. ‘Venskapspakten’, ‘Friendship's Pact’ is probably most memorable for its evocation of the countryside near Delphi where a stream descending from Mount Parnassus itself flows near the peasant hut which is the narrator's childhood home. Also it vividly sketches what life in an occupied country is like – Turkish-ruled Greece – and the discontent and disruptions that result. But psychologically the story is of the greatest interest to a student of Andersen's psychology. It centres round the pact of the title, an oath of brotherhood between two friends taken in a solemn ceremony presided over (as priestess) by whichever girl of the neighbourhood is judged the most virtuous and beautiful. In the case of the vow taken by the young sailor Aphtanides and the narrator, the girl in question, Anastasia, is the latter's adopted sister whom he has loved – with an ever-increasing intensity – since she was brought naked into the house after being rescued by his father from a Turkish massacre. The reader is half led to expect a tragic outcome to the dilemma posed by the fact that Anastasia is also the object of his pact-friend's love. But Aphtanides is generous – literally so – he gives the narrator money to facilitate his marriage. It's as if – by an ingenious twist of the personnel – Edvard Collin had facilitated Andersen's marriage to his sister, Louise or Christian Voigt had bestowed Riborg on him.

41. EDB pp. 239–231.

42. By the end of the decade, 1850, Constantinople was estimated to have 785,000 inhabitants, and was cosmopolitan, progressive, expanding.

43. For Tanzimât, see James L. Gelvoin, The Modern Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

44. EDG pp. 165–166.

45. Ibid. p. 257.

46. Kustendje, the name for the Black Sea port once called Tomis – a Greek colony in Scythia, where reputedly Jason and the Argonauts landed after capturing the Golden Fleece, later taken over by the Romans. Ovid was banished there in 8 CE by Emperor Augustus and lived there, writing, until his death in 17 CE. The city was then named after Constantia, the half-sister of Constantine the Great. Largely Romanian (Wallachian)-speaking in Andersen's day, it is now not only Romania's largest port but the largest of all Black Sea ports.

47. Jason and his companions sailed across the Black Sea in their ship Argo to Colchis (in today's Georgia) in order to seize the Golden Fleece. This task was accomplished partly due to the aid of the Colchian princess, Medea, whom Jason proceeded to marry. She avenged herself on Jason when he deserted her, by killing her rival and their children. Jason died when a fragment of the Argo fell on his head. His adventures were commemorated in the Alexandrian-Hellenic epic by Apollonius of Rhodes (fl. 3rd century BCE), For an account of The Argonauts see Peter Levi: A History of Greek Literature. Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1985, pp. 420–423 ff.). It contains enough geographical details and oddities to have delighted Andersen, who evokes Jason and the Argonauts rhapsodically in accounts of his Black Sea voyage. Andersen was naturally very pleased when the ship taking him up the Danube turned out to be called the Argo.

48. Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 43 BCE–17 CE). Ovidn had already written six books of his Metamorphoses and tried to regain favour with the Emperor Augustus when he was sent into permanent exile by the latter in Tomis on the Black Sea. The reason for the expulsion is still unclear. See R.O.A.M. Lyne on ‘Ovid’. The Oxford History of the Classsical World edited by John Boardman, Jasper Griffin and Oswyn Murray. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

49. EDB pp. 285–289.

50. For the outlined itinerary see Y by Y 1841.

51. Following, unrest, Wallachia was placed under Russian military administration by the Treaty of Adrianople, 1829, without removing it from suzerainty to the Ottoman Empire. By the time of Andersen's visit, Wallachia traded outside the Empire, and had grown economically and demographically. The years ahead were difficult: Gheorghe Bibescu, elected to the throne, proved less than supportive of ‘Romanian’ language-based clamour for national independence (union with the Moldavians), and the popular dissatisfaction culminated in the Wallachian Revolution of 1848. The Wallachian language (of the Romance group) – which Andersen's young friend Adam Marco speaks – is what today would be termed Romanian, but was written (until 1860) in the Cyrillic, not Latin, alphabet.

52. EDB pp. 297–308.

53. Rustzuk is today Bulgaria's fifth town in size, and connected to Romanian Giurgiu by the Ruse-Giurgiu Friendship bridge, the only bridge spanning the Bulgarian and Romanian stretch of the Danube. Rustzuk was to be the birthplace of Elias Canetti (1905–94), who came from a Sephardic (Ladino-speaking) family.

54. EDB pp. 308–313. For further information about Serbia and the Balkans, see Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804–1999. London: Granta, 1999.

55. The Iron Gates is the gorge on the Danube that forms the frontier of Romania (to the north) and Serbia (to the south) separating the Carpathians (Romanian) from the Balkans (Serbian). Navigation of this narrow stretch of river was severely impeded by rocks and not improved until the late 19th century.

56. EDB pp. 315–321.

57. Ibid. pp. 327–328.

58. Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847), co-dedicatee with Tieck of the German section of this travelogue, would in the year of his entertaining Andersen publish four books of his famous Songs Without Words for piano. His Symphony 2, Lobgesang, ‘Hymn of Praise’ had come out the previous year (1840) and his engaging Symphony 3, ‘The Scotch’, today still firmly in the concert repertoire, would appear in the following one (1842).

59. EDB p. 365.

60. Y by Y 1841.

Chapter 8: The Canonical Stories

1. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1978, pp. 104–105.

2. The others are ‘Engelen’ (‘The Angel’), ‘Nattergalen’ (‘The Nightingale’) and ‘Kjærestefolkene’ (‘The Sweethearts’). The print run (850 copies) sold out immediately, as did the reprint the next month (December 1843).

3. Y by Y 1842.

4. My Fairy-Tale Life: ‘At the homes of what are called the leading families in the country I met a number of cordial, friendly people who valued the good qualities they found in me and accepted me in their circles, allowing me during the summer to share in their good fortune … It was there I really got to know the Danish countryside. … Here, I was not a poor child of the people: no, I was a guest who received a kindly welcome.’ pp. 235–236. Gisselfeld had formerly been a monastery, Christmas in the big house was hospitable and Nordic in style, and Andersen, like its owners, loved the beech-woods all around. Visit www.gisselfeld-kloster.dk.

5. The Bird in the Pear Tree debuted on 4 July 1842 with a total of six performances, and despite the good initial response aroused vitriolic reactions, some of it orchestrated by Heiberg, even though his wife Johanne was taking the leading role of Henriette. Frederick J. Marker in Hans Christian Andersen and the Romantic Theatre, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971, considers it one of ‘Andersen's most delightful plays’ (p. 133), a vaudeville calling for ingenious staging. ‘[The] quarrel of two neighbours provides the comic background for the amorous intrigue of Herman and Henriette; here, too, love surmounts all obstacles, including a fence erected between the feuding neighbours’ gardens and figuring prominently in the action. A high point in this atmospheric genre sketch is Andersen's rich characterization of Counsellor Arents, who in spite of his basically friendly nature becomes entangled in the neighbour['s] dispute over the pear-tree’ (p. 36).

6. The chapter of My Fairy-Tale Life quoted in note 4 continues: ‘From Gisselfeld I went to the splendid, charming manor of Bregentved, where I was invited by Count Wilhelm Moltke, Danish Minister of Finance of beloved and blessed memory. The hospitality I met there, the happy, domestic life in which I shared, brought sunshine into my life.’ Visit www.bregentved.dk.

7. E og H Vol 1 p. 365.

8. Ibid for both phrases.

9. Hans Andersen [sic], Forty-two Stories translated from the Danish by M. R. James. London: Faber, 1930. From ‘The Ugly Duckling’: ‘Round the fields and meadows there were large woods and within them deep lakes; indeed, it was pleasant out in the country. Full in the sunshine, an old manor house stood.’

10. E og H Vol I p. 368.

11. See The Complete Book of British Birds. Basingstoke and Sandy: RSPB, 1988/1998, pp. 96–97.

12. The two wild geese have been identified as two companions of Andersen's; see p. 201. See also Tatar AA p. 107. Bagger's somewhat reckless life, marked by alcohol addiction and marital upheaval, was indeed to end sadly, like his surrogate here, in early death, brought about by recalcitrant elements in his very nature, so the incident here is uncomfortably prophetic.

13. Marie Tatar points out (Tatar AA p. 108): ‘The old woman plays a subordinate role in the household, with the purring cat and egg-laying hen serving as master and mistress.’ This only compounds the claustrophobia of the cottage from which the duckling has, for his own sake, to escape.

14. E og H Vol I p. 375.

15. Jack Zipes Hans Christian Andersen The Misunderstood Storyteller. New York and London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 69–70. Zipes goes so far as to say, ‘The fine line between eugenics and racism fades in this story where the once-upon-a-time dominated swan reveals himself a tame but noble member of a superior race.’ It is hard to argue against this, but I hope my argument – that the conceit is primarily about the artists and art in an increasingly philistine world – does something to mitigate the charge.

16. Georg Brandes's three-part examination of Andersen in the summer of 1869, ‘H.C. Andersen som Æventyrdigter’ (‘H.C. Andersen as fairy-tale writer’), appeared in Illustreret Tidende on 11 July, 18 July and 25 July. See Elias Bredsdorff, H.C. Andersen and Georg Brandes. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1994, pp. 40ff.

17. E og H Vol I p. 379.

18. Zipes, op. cit. p. 70. ‘In appealing to the “noble” sentiments of a refined audience and his readers, Andersen reflected a distinct class bias if not classical racist tendencies.’

19. Jens Andersen HCA p. 231.

20. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) wrote her own poetic tribute to Andersen. Dated ‘Rome, May 1861’, ‘The North and the South’ was in fact her last poem. In its dialogue between the two opposites it stresses the need of the North (Northern Europe) for the sun and fecundity of the South (Southern Europe). Its last two stanzas read: ‘“And O, for a steer to discern the same!”’ Sigh'd the South to the North;/“For a poet's tongue of baptismal flame,/To call the tree or the flower by its name!”/Sigh'd the South to the North.’ ‘The North sent therefore a man of men,/As a grace to the South;/And thus to Rome came Andersen,/“Alas, but must you take him again?”/Said the South to the North.’

21. Pen Browning (1849–1912) was the Brownings' only child, surrounded in his precocious Italian childhood by an over-protective solicitousness. This ended after his mother's death in 1861. He devoted himself to sport at Oxford University (he left without a degree) and later became – promoted by his father – a moderately successful painter and sculptor.

22. Quoted in Wullschlager HCA p. 374. Letter from Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning edited by F.G. Kenyon. London: Macmillan, 1897, Vol. II, p. 448.

23. Y by Y 1855.

24. Consider the final pictures we are given of the comfortable, eventless married life of the hero and his wife in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) and David Copperfield (1849–50).

25. From Balzac's avant-propos (foreword) to the 1842 collected edition of his Comédie humaine, translated by George Sainsbury, 1901. This fascinating profession of authorial intention actually states: ‘The idea [i.e. of the Comédie] originated in a comparison between Humanity and Animality.’

26. Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869). As restless in temperament as Andersen himself, Lamartine experienced religious crises and passionate love affairs in his earlier years. Fame came with poems (1817) inspired by the death of his lover Mme Julie Charles, who had died in 1817. After marriage, service as a diplomat, and election to the Académie française, he embraced the July Revolution of 1830. By the time Andersen met him, he was espousing a spiritual, somewhat pantheistic notion of progress. The travelogue of his that Andersen read was Souvenirs d'un voyage en orient (Bredsdorff, op. cit. p. 158). Andersen's need for friends like him is well put by Sven H. Rossel in his preface to the Diaries (p. x): ‘Travel was Andersen's life-blood. It put him in touch with the great masterpieces of Western civilization – its monuments, its statuary, its paintings, its music, and not least, its theatre. In Paris he could speak with Hugo, Lamartine, and Heine about life and art, as he never could with colleagues in the feud-ridden, claustrophobic Copenhagen of his day.’

27. Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863). From a noble family, and the author of romantic drama and poems, de Vigny did not respond favourably to the 1830 July Revolution. His most popular work is perhaps his prose recapturing of his ten-year-long military experiences Servitude et grandeur militaire (1835). At the time of Andersen's meetings with him he had embarked on Poèmes philosophiques, published between 1838 and 1844 in La Revue des Deux Mondes.

28. See D for 1843 pp. 129–130: ‘Thursday, March 23. … That very day there had been a big argument, Buntzen [Danish surgeon resident in Paris] told me, among the ladies about whether Balzac or I was the greater writer. … Saturday, March 25 … I was picked up by Buntzen at 10 o'clock, and we walked to Countess Pfaffin's on rue Sainte-Anne for the soirée. There I met Balzac, to whom I paid some compliments. He was a short, broad-shouldered stocky fellow.’

29. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, translated by A.J. Krailsheimer. Oxford: World's Classics, 1991. p. 263.

30. ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ was published in Part Three (‘Dramatic Lyrics’) of Robert Browning's Bells and Pomegranates (1842). It, like Andersen's earlier tales, was explicitly ‘told to children’, addressed to Willie Macready, the great actor's son.

31. A prime mover towards the criminalisation of homosexuality was H.C. Ørsted's brother, the eminent jurist and politician Anders Sandøe Ørsted (1778–1860). Comparatively liberal during the Absolute Monarchy, he became progressively more reactionary afterwards. His term as Prime Minister (21 April 1853–12 December 1854) ended in forced resignation because of his attempts to get a new, ultra-conservative constitution through. Denmark completely decriminalised homosexuality in 1933, only the third European country to do so, and now stands in the very vanguard of gay rights, with the age of consent at 15.

32. Y by Y 1844. The affair with Henrik (Baron) Stampe is not recorded in any diaries, but letters and almanac entries testify to what Professor de Mylius calls ‘a close and passionate relationship’: ‘The almanac from the first few months of 1844 is extremely ambiguous, containing a great deal of initials, rather than names. … marked by jealousy, anger, desperation and sensuality.’ By the summer, however, he wrote to Jette Collin of ‘Stampe's intense love for me which then evaporated once he had used me as a ladder by which to reach Jonna’.

33. ‘The Fir Tree’ came out in Nye Eventyr, Første Bind Anden Samling (New Tales, First Volume, Second Collection) on 21 December 1844, together with ‘The Snow Queen’. Andersen relates in his Notes – E og H Vol V pp. 312–313 – that the idea came to him in the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, during a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Perhaps the fir tree learning harsh truths about existence after pining for luxury and then finding luxury insouciant about his real needs can be attributed to Mozart's opera, or rather to Andersen's reception of it.

34. E og H Vol 1 p. 384.

35. ‘Hänsel und Gretel’ appeared in the Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1812 and 1857.

36. For characteristics of the Norway Spruce and also for the German/European Christmas festivities associated with the tree, see Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996, pp. 19–25.

37. Christmas 1808; the tree in question was indeed a Norway Spruce.

38. Christian Hole, English Custom and Usage. London: Batsford, 1941–42, pp. 14–25, including a reference to Charles Greville.

39. Jackie Wullschlager HCA pp. 247–249.

40. E og H Vol 1 p. 384.

41. See Chapter 12.

42. E og H Vol 1 p. 386.

43. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books. Oxford: World's Classics, 2006, p. 40.

44. The rhyming titles ‘Ivede-Avede’ and ‘Klumpe-Dumpe’ both suggest the story of them being known in English as Humpty Dumpty, who had a great fall, irreparable because he is essentially an egg (though Andersen's wins the princess). See The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona and Peter Opie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, pp. 213–16. Andersen's friend J.M. Thiele; see Chapter 1 notes 28 and 44) included in Danske Folkesagn (1820–23) ‘Lille Trille laae paa Hylde; Lille Trille ned af Hylde; Ingen Mand i hele Land/Lille Trille curere kan’, which nursery-rhyme compiler J.O. Halliwell (1820–1889) in Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (1849) translated as ‘Little Trille lay on a shelf; Little Trille thence pitch'd himself; Not all the men in our land, I ken; Can put Little Trille right again.’ Op. cit. p. 215.

45. E og H Vol I p. 391.

46. Ibid. p. 392.

47. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, scene i, lines 156–158. New Penguin Shakespeare, 1968, edited by Anne Righter (Anne Barton), p. 120.

48. E og H Vol I p. 392.

49. See W. Glyn Jones, Denmark, a Modern History. London: Croom Helm, 1986, Appendix 1: The Faeroe Islands; Appendix 2: Greenland, pp. 216–217.

50. Spitsbergen is the largest island of Svalbard, though formerly the name (often incorrectly spelled by the British as Spitzbergen) was often used for the whole archipelago. It lies roughly midway between the north of Norway and the North Pole, has an Arctic climate and contains considerable wilderness areas. It is the habitat of polar bears and reindeer, and breeding-ground for many seabirds. Its Dutch name is descriptive, meaning ‘pointed mountains’. Andersen would rightly have thought it uninhabited, though a base for fishing and whaling expeditions; Longyearbyen did not exist, even as a very small community, until the late 19th century. Denmark claimed the island after its explorations of 1617, and retained it (as part of the Dual Monarchy) until 1814, when, together with Norway itself, it was handed over to Sweden. When the Union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved, it returned to Norway, and from 1925 has been a fully integrated part of that country. One could say that Andersen's story tells us that the Arctic power (Snow Queen), is Dano-Norwegian (or even Swedish-Danish-Norwegian).

51. Peter Asbjørnsen (1812–85) collaborated so closely with Jørgen Moe in working methods and style, that the two are usually spoken of as a single entity, Asbjørnsen-and-Moe, though Asbjørnsen did publish a collection of his own, Huldre-Eventyr (Tales of the Huldre, 1845). Asbjørnsen had begun to write down folk tales he had collected as a 20-year-old student of zoology at university (Christiania). He made extensive expeditions on foot throughout Norway in search of material. He was also active on behalf of Norwegian forests in protest against deforestation, becoming Forest Master until his retirement in 1876. Norske Folkeevntyr was hailed all over Europe as a work of literature as well as of socio-anthropology, and there were two further collections in 1844 and 1871.

52. Jørgen Moe (1813–82) was 14 when he became friendly with Asbjørnsen, the two studying for the same exam, though it was some years before they appreciated just how coincident their interests and their pursuit of them were and joined forces. Moe too travelled a good deal in search of material, particularly in the mountains of southern Norway. He studied theology and took orders in 1853, eventually rising to a bishopric. He was also a distinguished lyric poet, and one of his most famous songs ‘Sæterjentens Søndag’ was set to music by Ole Bull (see Chapter 6).

53. C.S.A Bille and N. Bøgh, Breve fra H.C. Andersen. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1877, pp. 475–478.

54. ‘Elder Mother’. This is one of Andersen's most delightful stories with its sensitive, subtle depiction of the small boy who has caught cold, the amusing old man who lives in the apartment at the top of his house and who entertains the boy, in his indisposition, with a story, its feeling for the way one generation succeeds another, and for the gentle, fertile charms of the Danish countryside. Limpid and conversational in style, it also looks back to the complex Chinese-box devices of Hoffmann and forward to the mise-en-abŷme of 20th-century modernist writing. The elderly man, who needs fairy stories to knock on his forehead and enter him, spins a tale round the teapot in the room; the pot turns out to be full of elder, in which lives an old woman, presiding over an old couple's golden wedding anniversary. But then she in turn transmogrifies into a young girl, who takes the hand of the invalid boy and escorts him through successive stages of life until he reaches the age and circumstances of the old, long-gone anniversary couple. Of course he is brought back to plain ‘reality’ in the end, and as for Elder-Tree Mother, just let her stay in the teapot!

55. C.S.A. Bille and N. Bøgh, Breve H.C. Andersen. Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1877, pp. 475–478.

56. Ibid. pp. 475–8

57. The actual publication date was 21 December 1844. See note 33 for further details.

58. We remember that the author's father, Hans Andersen, expressly did not believe in the devil, only in bad impulses in the individual.

59. Perhaps Andersen's deep feeling for this inclusiveness goes right back to his early childhood and his encounter with Spanish soldiers quartered in Fyn during the Napoleonic War: ‘One day a Spanish soldier took me up in his arms and pressed against my lip a silver image which he wore on his naked breast. I remember that my mother was angry about this, for it was something Catholic, she said, but I liked the image and the foreign soldier’ (MF-TL p. 15). The image was indubitably a crucifix, a representation of Christ.

60. ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ ‘under the mirror of eternity’: Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch-Jewish philosopher, in Ethics V xxxi (1677).

61. Goethe Faust Part One, translated by David Luke. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1987, pp. 9–12.

62. E og H Vol I pp. 133–134.

63. E og H Vol I p. 396.

64. Ibid. p. 396.

65. Of his grandmother Andersen wrote: ‘She was employed to look after the garden belonging to the hospital [asylum]’ (MF-TL p. 16).

66. James Massengale, ‘About Little Gerda and Her “Moratoria”’, in Hans Christian Andersen. Between Children's Literature and Adult Literature. Papers from the Fourth International Hans Christian Andersen Conference 2005. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2007, pp. 478–504.

67. E og H Vol I p. 397 for both Kay's two questions and Grandmother's answer.

68. Ibid. p. 399.

69. H.A. Brorson (1694–1764, a Danish pietist clergyman who began writing his many hymns when he was a pastor in southern Jutland. He rose to become Bishop of Ribe. His hymns – such as the famous Christmas one ‘Den yndigste Rose er funden’ (‘The loveliest rose is found’) – have beauty as lyric poems, and, after a period of comparative obscurity, were rediscovered and reappraised by the Romantic generation – by Grundvig and Oehlenschläger, for instance.

70. Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 120–163.

71. Wolfgang Lederer, The Kiss of the Snow Queen. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986. The subtitle of this thoughtful and thought-provoking study indicates its concerns: Hans Christian Andersen and Man's Redemption by Woman.

72. Ibid. pp. 26–28.

73. E og H Vol I p. 398.

74. Ibid. p. 398.

75. Ibid. p. 401.

76. See ‘Vanddraaben’ (‘A Drop of Water’, 1848).

77. W.A. Bentley and W.J. Humphrey, Snow Crystals. New York: McGraw Hill, 1931.

78. George Steiner, My Unwritten Books. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, pp. 1–30 (Chapter One, ‘Chinoiserie’).

79. Op. cit., pp. 7–8.

80. E og H Vol I p. 403.

81. Finnmark is Norway's largest and most northern county, open to the Arctic Ocean by the shores of which most of its inhabitants live. The Sami, on the other hand, live mostly in its inland area, largely taken up with a vast plateau, the Finnmarksvidda. Here tens of thousands of Sami-owned and -tended reindeer graze. The Sami language has now been given official status and they have their own parliament. Finnmark has land borders with Russia and Finland.

82. Kalevala is the name given to an epic poem wrought out of Finnish oral poetry traceable to the first millennium CE, preserving the rhythm of singing and given narrative shape by Finnish scholar Elias Lönrott (see note 85 below). See Keith Bosley's detailed introduction to the edition cited below.

83. Kalevala, translated by Keith Bosley. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989, Book 12, pp. 144–145.

84. The words ‘Lapp’ and ‘Lappish’ – though, of course, found in a majority of 19th- and 20th-century books and other printed matter – have now been replaced by the term ‘Sami’. The great majority of Sami live in Norway – c.42,000. Of the rest, 20,000 live in Sweden, 6,000 in Finland, and 2,000 in Russia. See, for example, www.Lapland-travel-info.com.

85. Elias Lönnrot (1802–84) was a Finnish scholar and district health officer, who published his first edition of the Kalevala in 1835, the same year as Andersen's first novel and first two booklets of fairy tales. In 1840–41 he produced the Kantelaar, a collection of Finnish lyrics from the same oral tradition. He brought out the second massive edition of the Kalevala in 1849.

86. The Finnish province of Karelia (Karjala), cradle of Finnic tradition, was divided into two after Finland lost the 1939–1940 Winter War, and the eastern part (11% of Finnish territory) went to Russia. This, now the Republic of Karelia, is part of the federal republic of Russia, and Karelian (closely related to Finnish, and by some thought to be a dialect of it) is widely spoken but not given official status as yet.

87. Translated into English by Joan Tate as Blackwater. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995.

88. The quotation from Tacitus is to be found in Keith Bosley's introduction to his translation of Kalevala (see note 83 above), p. xviii.

89. E og H Vol I p. 430.

90. There are nine extant Sami languages, not all of which are mutually intelligible, due to divisive geographical features; one, Northern Lappish (Norway, Sweden and Finland), accounts for more than 75% of speakers. Scholars are more split than formerly over the relationship of these as a language group to other groups within the Uralic (or Finno-Ugric) family. Commonly it was assumed that it was the closest to the Finnic (which includes Finnish and Estonian) but it is thought that the resemblances may be explained by sustained political/educational influence. Other Uralic groups are Hungarian, Mordvinic and the Samoyed languages. See Pekka Sammallahti, The Saami [sic] Languages: An Introduction. Kárásjohka: Davvi Girji, 1998.

91. E og H Vol I p. 404.

92. Ibid. pp. 404–405.

93. Andersen would have been familiar with Osiris from Mozart's Magic Flute (1791) with its great aria and chorus: ‘O Isis und Osiris!’ For accounts of Osiris and his cult, see the one-volume edition of Sir James George Fraser's The Golden Bough, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1994, pp. 366–374.

94. Ibid. pp. 300–305, 331–334.

95. The Golden Bough (1890), then expanded into 12 volumes, 1906–15. In addition to its radical ideas and its vast influence on the modernists, the work is a summation of the long 19th-century obsession with the relationship between myth/folklore and religion, so prevalent a theme in this book.

96. Ejnar Stig Askgaard, ‘Look! Now we'll begin. When we have got to the end of the story we shall know more than we do now’, in Hans Christian Andersen. Between Children's Literature and Adult Literature. Papers from the Fourth International Hans Christian Andersen Conference, 2005. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2007, pp. 547–569.

97. Balder, son of Odin and Frigg, was so beloved by the gods that Frigg obtained a promise from all living things not to bring any harm to him. The mistletoe, however, because of the way it grows, was outside this oath-taking. Loki, the trickster god, therefore got Balder's blind brother Hodr to shoot an arrow of mistletoe at the handsome, seemingly invulnerable god. He died. Writes Askgaard, ‘It would seem as if “The Snow Queen” is a religious version – a “literary myth” – of the fertility myths, so it would seem natural [knowing Andersen's great interest in the field] to investigate a version of such a myth in Norse mythology, e.g. the one found in the tale of Balder's death’, ibid. p. 557.

98. Andersen's feeling for the Odense River is exemplified in the beautiful short fairy tale ‘Klokkedybet’ (‘The Bell Deep’), 1856.

99. E og H Vol I p. 405.

100. ‘The Red Shoes’ (1845). This story has fascinated, horrified and morally repelled readers in about equal measure. If, in ‘The Snow Queen’, Gerda's action with her shoes illustrates her dominant unselfishness, Karen's red shoes – seemingly a perverse choice of footwear anyway, since, in all instances given, the circumstances demand the conventional formal black – show her extreme selfishness, which grows the more its appetites are fed. The shoes are themselves the instruments of her punishment, causing her to dance and dance until she despairs, in pain and fatigue, of ever stopping. Even when the executioner obliges her by severing her feet from her legs, she still doesn't part company from them, since they dance mercilessly in front of her whichever direction she turns. Only when she becomes a modest servant to a pastor and his family, who are sorry for her disability, does her life take a better turn – but she dies within a short time of entering this pious household. The story creates many difficulties; the heroine's name, Karen, is that of Andersen's half-sister, Karen-Marie, who had turned up in 1842, to his dismay – and (modest) financial cost. Karen-Marie's disreputable lifestyle may be reflected in the fairly obvious sexual symbolism of the shoes (both on and off the girl's feet), suggesting the power of erotic desire. The story meets with strong and well articulated moral disapproval from Jack Zipes in Hans Christian Andersen The Misunderstood Storyteller. New York: London, Routledge, 2005, pp. 86–89, emphasising Andersen's proneness to insist on subjugation of fantasy and appetite where his female characters are concerned, though he allows Gerda to be a triumphant exception. He does, however, draw attention to a somewhat different approach to the tale by Erin Mackie, ‘Red Shoes, and Bloody Stumps’, in Footnotes: On Shoes, edited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Here the red shoes are set in the context of ‘a socio-religious system fixed against her [Karen]’. I would agree with this, and emphasise the importance of the girl's poverty (Karen-Marie's?) to the tale's opening. The little girl's ankles are red (through being inadequately shod) and old Mother Shoemaker, in order to oblige her a little more comfortably, makes her first pair of shoes out of old strips of red cloth. No wonder she didn't comport herself as respectable girls do – and she does end up, reductive though it rightly seems to our way of thinking, loved, useful and an imminent enjoyer of God's everlasting peace.

101. Tatar AA p. 42.

102. E og H Vol I p. 433.

103. Ibid. p. 432.

104. See East of the Sun and West of the Moon by Peter Asbjørnsen (Moe's name omitted from title page), translated by George Darsent. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995.

105. E og H Vol I pp. 404–413.

106. Ibid. pp. 414–422.

107. Wolfgang Lederer, The Kiss of the Snow Queen. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986 pp. 42–43.

108. Massengale, op. cit., p. 488.

109. ‘Language of Flowers’ in Jack Goody, op.cit., pp. 232–260.

110. E og H Vol I p. 414.

111. Lederer, op. cit., pp. 39–44.

112. E og H Vol I p. 421.

113. Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian. London: Everyman edition, 1906, pp. 306–313.

114. All sentences from E og H Vol I pp. 423–424.

115. Lederer, op. cit. pp. 52–58.

116. The provinces of Sweden's Norrland not abutting on the Arctic Circle and the Sami domains are Gästrikland, Medelpad, Ångermanland, Hälsingland, Jämtland, Härjedalen and Västerbotten.

117. Displays of Aurora Borealis are most frequent around the equinox, and appear as a greenish glow in the sky, and sometimes as a reddish one. At their most spectacular, they will continue for many hours, but can sometimes be of only a few minutes' duration. They are caused by a collision of particles with atoms in the thermosphere, the particles being delivered into the atmosphere by the Earth's magnetic field. Finnish Lapland perhaps offers the most consistent good opportunities for viewing this phenomenon.

118. E og H Vol I p. 429.

119. See Chapter 1.

120. Jens Andreas Friis, Lappisk-mythologi-eventyr-og-folkesagn. online.

121. From translators' Preface to My Sun, My Father. Guovdageaidnu, Norway: DAT O.S., 1988 in Sami, printed in Vaasa, Finland, 1997 and distributed by University of Washington Press, Seattle: ‘Nils-Aslak Valkeapää was born in 1943 to a reindeer breeding family in Sapmi, homeland of the Sami … A Finnish citizen, he lives in both Norway and Finland. He studied and received teacher's certification, but instead, devoted his life to the arts. … He served as the first cultural coordinator in the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.’

122. My Sun, My Father. See above, p. 52; translations by Ralph Salisbury, Lars Nordström, Harald Gaski.

123. Jens Andreas Friis website: see note 120.

124. The Kalevala translated by Keith Bosley. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989, pp. 159–161.

125. Tatar AA p. 42, note 38.

126. ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, op. cit., pp. 195–196.

127. All phrases from E og H Vol I p. 436.

128. All phrases E og H Vol I pp. 439–440.

129. Massengale, op. cit pp. 496–499.

130. Ejnar Stig Askgaard, op. cit., pp. 547–569.

131. Ibid. p. 440.

132. D pp. 159–163.

133. Ibid. pp. 72–85.

134. This was sent off to Lorck on 13 August 1846. Y by Y 1846. This, as already mentioned, is the short autobiography rendered into German and published in that language in Leipzig 1847: Das Märchen meines Lebens ohne Dichtung.

135. Andersen arrived in Føhr on 29 August and stayed until 9 September (see Y by Y 1844). He was personally congratulated on his writings by King Christian VIII, who inquired about his earnings and implied that he would like to raise his annuity. However, Andersen could not bring himself to follow this through. He heard that his annuity had been raised on 8 April 1845.

136. He arrived in Berlin on 17 December 1845 and stayed until 7 January 1846, at the very centre of Berlin's high life as the ‘hero of the day’. He greatly appreciated his meetings with Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, by far his warmest and most satisfactory to date, and the praise of Wilhelm for ‘The Fir Tree’, with its very German attention to the forest and Christmas ceremonial.

137. This was The Improvisatore; or Life in Italy, with a prefatory biography of Andersen made by Mary Howitt from Marmier's essay. Mary Howitt (1799–1888), author of many children's books and translator, with her husband William (1792–1879), of books from German and Scandinavian languages, moved in literary circles in both England and Continental Europe (France, Germany, Austria, Italy). For Andersen's connections with her, literary, personal and social, see Chapter 9.

138. Jenny Lind (1820–87), ‘the Swedish Nightingale’, the most famous soprano of her times. Jenny was born out of wedlock in Stockholm, though her parents married when she was 14. It was not as hard a childhood as Andersen's own – her mother was an educated teacher – but as dramatic in the opportunities presented and taken, and in the speed of ascent. Jenny was singing on stage when she was 10, sang the lead role in Der Freischütz when she was 18, and became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy at 20. Andersen fell in love with her during her tour of Denmark in 1843. She was admired by Meyerbeer, Schumann, Mendelssohn (there has been conjecture that he and she were lovers) and Berlioz, and premièred leading roles in operas by Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi. She also enjoyed an emotional friendship with Chopin. She made a spectacular but exhausting tour of America in 1850–51, arousing wide ‘Lind mania’. She married pianist and conductor Otto Goldschmidt in 1852; they had three children and from 1855 made their home in England.

139. Little Kirsten: première 12 May 1846 with 310 performances, music by J.P.E. Hartmann. Partly derived from old ballads, and celebrating the rural peasantry and medieval lore, it was rapturously received, Kjøbenhavnsposten proclaiming it, on 25 May 1846, ‘the loveliest painting we have seen on the Danish stage for a long time, a picture which leaves a deep and beautiful impression on the spectator.’ Frederick J. Marker, op. cit. p. 48.

140. E og H Vol II p. 123.

141. Ibid p. 123.

142. Ibid. p. 129.

143. See Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, introduced and translated by Leopold von Loewenstein-Wertheim. Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2008.

144. E og H Vol II. p. 115.

145. Ibid. p. 123.

146. Ibid. p. 124.

147. Ibid. p. 124.

148. Ibid. p. 114.

149. Ibid. pp. 112–113.

150. See Chapter 7, note 34.

151. E og H Vol II p. 113.

152. Ibid. p. 114.

153. Ibid. p. 114.

154. Ibid. p. 114.

155. Ibid. p. 115.

156. Ibid. p. 115.

157. Ibid. p. 115.

158. Ibid. p. 115.

159. Casorti. See note 17 to Chapter 1. For commedia dell’ arte, see note 33 to Chapter 7.

160. Carlo Goldoni (1707–93) was the author of over 200 plays, and believed that Italian theatre should move on from the commedia dell'arte, even while drawing from it, substituting witty, thoughtful dialogue for the usual improvisation or stock responses. Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), though the younger man, was fiercely, even morally opposed to this. His own plays have fantastic elements that endeared them to the Romantic generation of critics.

161. E og H Vol II p. 117.

162. Ibid. p. 122.

163. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99). An adventurous life involving confidential missions for Louis XV and Louis XVI and writing scabrous plays for private performances in aristocratic households, together with involvement with the works of Voltaire, encouraged him in the complex cynicism which informs both his most famous plays. The trickster servant Figaro is at once menacing and subordinate to the society he ingeniously serves and a figure with whom audiences sympathise.

164. Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé; translated by Richard and Clara Winston. London: Fontana/Flamingo, 1983, p. 262.

165. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’, 1934/1954, in Collected Works Vol. 9, edited by Herbert Read. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968, pp. 284ff.

166. E og H Vol II p. 116.

167. Ibid. p. 116.

168. Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophische Entwurf (On Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project, 1795).

169. E og H Vol II p. 119.

170. Ibid. p. 120.

171. S. Körner, Kant. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955 (particularly Chapter 8, ‘Kant's Theory of Aesthetic Taste’, pp. 175–195.

172. Tatar AA p. 271, note 20. For the quote from the Critique see Paul Guyer, ‘Immanuel Kant’, in Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2004: www.rep.routledge.com/article/DB047.

173. Ibid. On the above webpage.

174. Simon Schaffer, ‘The Phoenix of Nature: Fire and Evolutionary Cosmology in Wright and Kant’, Journal of the History of Astronomy, Vol. 9 (1978), p. 186 (includes English translation of Kant's German).

175. E og H Vol II. p. 120.

176. Ibid. p. 121.

177. Oehlenschläger: See Introductory note 18, p. 424.

178. The term was given currency through Kant's essay in Berlinische Monatschrift (Berlin Monthly), December 1784: ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ ‘Answering the question: What is Enlightenment?’ arguing that church and state prescriptions should be replaced by freedom of individual thought.

179. E og H Vol II p. 117.

180. Ibid. p. 121.

181. Ibid. p. 121.

182. Eugène Scribe (1791–1861). Immensely successful dramatist, author of over 300 plays, and to whom the commercial ideal of the ‘well-made play’ is usually ascribed. Ingenious and tight-knit in plot, often lively in scene and dialogue, his plays reflect an anti-Romantic attitude to human behaviour, dealing with familial discord, adultery, difficult liaisons, etc. in a lively and ultimately acceptable manner, stimulating but never distressing his boulevard public.

183. E og H Vol II p. 122.

184. Ibid. p. 122.

185. This extraordinary work, by James Hogg (1770–1835), ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, is a study in antinomianism: a young man ‘saved’ according to the tenets of his faith, and seemingly virtuous, is led by a mysterious stranger (a Shadow Self) to commit a series of horrible murders, two victims being members of his own family. In fact the stranger is the devil, and the young man himself commits suicide, his own death being the only logical conclusion to the chain of deaths he has set in train.

186. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847). London: Chatto & Windus, Zodiac edition, 1947, Chapter 9, p. 75.

Part Two: From ‘Det Gamle Hus’ (‘The Old House’) to ‘Tante Tandpine’ (‘Auntie Toothache’)

Chapter 9: Britain, Dickens, Revolutions and Wars

1. D p. 164.

2. Ibid. p. 174.

3. William Jerdan (1782–1869) became the editor of the Literary Gazette, which he co-founded with Henry Colburn, in 1817 and remained in situ until 1850. Scottish-born (in Kelso) he came to London in 1806 and worked as a reporter. He became friends with many leading literary figures, including George Crabbe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Russell Mitford. He wrote an Autobiography (1852–53) and an account of some of his friendships, Men I Have Known (1866).

4. Mary Howitt (1799–1888) was born Mary Botham, and married Derbyshire-born William Howitt in 1821. At the start of their married life William ran a chemist's shop in Nottingham, but after fifteen years the couple could support themselves and their children on their writings. Independently and together they produced some 180 books and translations. They travelled extensively, wintering in Rome and summering in Austria, and William and two sons spent time in Australia. William was the author of a book about his Derbyshire boyhood, The Boy's Country-book (1839). Later in their lives the Howitts moved from Quakerism to – in William's case – spiritualism, and – in Mary's – Roman Catholicism.

5. MF-TL p. 463.

6. Y by Y 1846.

7. Richard Bentley (1794–1871). Born into a publisher/printer family, Bentley founded his famous firm in 1819, issuing books of a high production standard and aiming for a wide market while maintaining literary values. The ‘Standard Novels’ series began in 1831, with one-volume editions of triple-deckers being brought out at an attractive price (six shillings). In 1836 he launched Bentley's Miscellany, choosing Charles Dickens as the editon of the series. Sales were excellent as a result of the serialisation of Oliver Twist, but the two men did not get on well; eventually Dickens bought the copyright from Bentley, and he withdrew as editor, Harrison Ainsworth taking his place. Bentley was keen on publishing European writers, Lamartine and Chateaubriand among them, and also Americans such as Fenimore Cooper. Andersen greatly preferred the Bentleys' children to Dickens's.

8. D p. 167 ff.

9. MF-TL p. 381.

10. Ibid. p. 383.

11. Ibid. p. 383.

12. D p. 165.

13. Ibid. p. 193.

14. MF-TL p. 393.

15. Y by Y 1846.

16. E og H Vol II p. 71.

17. See Danish commentary by DSL (in the Archive for Danish Literature), www.andersen.sdu.dk.

18. E og H Vol II p. 71.

19. Ibid. p. 72.

20. Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Oxford: New Oxford Illustrated Dickens, 1948, p. 649.

21. MF-TL p. 389.

22. D p. 190.

23. Ibid. p. 185.

24. MF-TL p. 398.

25. Ibid. p. 400.

26. The Two Baronesses was to be published by Bentley in English on 28 September 1848 before its first Danish publication on 25 November 1848.

27. MF-TL pp. 414–415.

28. ‘The Old Street Lamp’ and ‘The Shadow’ had appeared in Nye Eventyr. Andet Bind. Første Samling (New Fairy-Tales. Second Volume. First Instalment) on 6 April 1847.

29. Introduction to A Christmas Greeting to My English Friends, translation by Charles Beckwith Lohmeyer. London: Richard Bentley, December 1848.

30. Andersen's Notes, E og H Vol V p. 315 describe how story came to him.

31. ‘The Child in the Grave’ is an attempt to reconcile the death of an innocent loved one, still a little child, with God and with goodness as a force in operation throughout earthly existence. Virtually a reworking of ‘The Story of a Mother’, it gives us a woman out of her mind with grief at the loss of her four-year-old son, and unable to appreciate her husband and her two surviving daughters. She encounters Death himself (a man dressed in black but with youthful eyes) beside her son's newly made grave. He leads her down into the region where the mourned deceased has gone. She learns from him that for her to yield entirely to grief is to inhibit her son's own personal ascent to God along with other children who have also died, and so she returns to her husband and family restored, with the strength to endure the tragedy.

32. First published in Danish in Nye Eventyr. Andet Bind. Anden Samling (New Fairy-Tales. Second Volume. Second Instalment) on 4 March 1848.

33. Written late January 1848. In Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 191.

34. Ibid. p.191.

35. M F-TL p. 397.

36. E og H Vol II p. 131.

37. Ibid. p. 132.

38. Ibid. p. 132.

39. Andersen's Notes, E og H Vol V p. 314.

40. E og H Vol II p. 134.

41. Andersen's Notes, E og H Vol V p. 314.

42. E og H Vol II p. 139.

43. Ibid. p. 139.

44. Ibid. pp. 140–141.

45. Ibid. p. 141.

46. Ibid. p. 141.

47. Ibid. p. 142.

48. Ibid. p. 142.

49. Ibid. p. 143.

50. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield. Oxford: New Oxford Illustrated Dickens, 1948, p. 218.

51. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. Oxford: New Oxford Illustrated Dickens, 1953, p. 458.

52. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, op. cit., p. 1.

53. Ibid. p. 87.

54. Ibid. p. 287.

55. Letter, June 1847, www.andersen.sdu.dk/service/biblio/date/1847.

56. Breve fra Hans Christian Andersen, Vol 11 Copenhagen Aschehoug, p. 558. Translation in Bredsdorff HCA p. 219.

57. D p. 210.

58. MF-TL p. 423.

59. Ibid. p. 424.

60. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, translated and edited by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Classics, 1996, p. 355.

61. W. Glyn Jones, Denmark, A Modern History, London: Croom Helm, 1986, pp. 33–35. See also for transition of reign and onset of war Y by Y 184.

62. Actually published on 31 March 1848. For information about the Three Years War, see Nick Svendsen, The First Schleswig-Holstein War. Solihull: Helion & Co., 2008. See also Y by Y 1848, 1849, 1850.

63. Hereditary Grand Duke Carl Alexander (1818–1901), Grand Duke of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach.

64. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, op. cit., p. 289.

65. D p. 212.

66. St Ronan's Well does, however, deal with heirs to aristocratic titles. Two half-brothers are the sons of the Earl of Etherington, and both love the daughter of the local laird.

67. It is surely noteworthy that it is in this year of revolution that Andersen gives us his first sustained instance of gratuitous cruelty by a landowner able to treat employees as he wishes.

68. See Chapter 12.

69. DTB p. 4.

70. Ibid. p. 21.

71. Ibid. p. 92.

72. D pp. 142–147.

73. Ibid. p. 141.

74. DTB p. 259.

75. W. Glyn-Jones, op. cit., pp 36–40 inclusive. Nick Svendsen, op. cit., passim. Y by Y 1849.

76. This was in fact Andersen's fourth visit to Sweden. On 17 May he went by boat from Copenhagen to Hälsingborg. From there he went to Gothenburg and then up the Göta Canal, through Lakes Vänern and Vättern to Stockholm. He was received by King Oscar I and made a public defence of Denmark's right to pursue the Schleswig war. He visited Uppsala, and then, back in the Swedish capital, met Bonnier the publisher/bookseller and Almquist the poet. He next went to Dalarna where the scenery enchanted him (midsummer celebrations at Leksand). His time in Sweden was a consciously sought antidote to the militarism coming from Germany. The travelogue of his journeys and meetings came out on 9 March 1851 simultaneously in Danish, German and English.

77. ‘Det var en Sommermorgen’, ‘It was a summer morning’, even before day had begun! Grundtvig's two sons Svein and Johan were involved in the fighting. The song evokes the old hero Holger-Danske and the present place of fray, Isted. It was later (1864) set to music by P.A. Heise.

78. Andersen did not hear of the death of Frederik Læssøe (1811–50) until two days later, 27 July. He was much moved and stirred to thoughts about the friendship of youth.

79. D p. 221.

80. MF-TL p. 464.

81. Ibid. pp. 484–485.

82. Ibid. pp. 473–476, some of which pages are taken up by a letter from Andersen to Ørsted about his great book and his grateful response to it. His Swedish travelogue reflected his enthusiasm for its first part, even in structure. See particularly Jens Andersen HCA pp. 416–420.

83. ‘Everything about her was a harmony of beauteous qualities imparted to her by genius. She was one of the people who drew me into the orbit of their spirit, their humour and their heart, and so she was reflected on me like sunlight on a plant.’ She was generous, too, to many outside her family and circle, ‘the poor, the sick, and the sorrowing’, p. 480.

84. Ibid. pp. 481–482.

85. See W. Glyn Jones, Denmark; A Modern History, op. cit., pp. 55–58.

86. Published on 30 November 1852 in Historier. Anden Samling (Stories. Second Collection). Note the starker, more adult titling.

87. Ibid. In this volume also appeared two stories we have considered already: ‘Thousands of Years to Come’ and ‘Under the Willow-tree’.

88. E og H Vol II p. 259.

89. Ibid. p. 258.

90. Ibid. p. 258.

91. Ibid. p. 248.

92. Ibid. p. 245.

93. Ibid. p. 245

94. Ibid. p. 247.

95. Nisse is the name given in Denmark, Norway and Skåne, the southern Swedish province formerly Danish, to a miniature humanoid creature who looks after a farm and its inhabitants in return for certain comforts, such as food. The name is the usual (affectionate) diminutive form of the Swedish Nils, hence its use by Selma Lagerlöf in her story: see note 17 to Chapter 5. In other parts of Sweden the creature is known as a tomte or tomte nisse.

96. E og H Vol II p. 265.

97. AVEIV p. 11.

98. Ibid. p. 230.

99. Ibid. p. 24.

100. Ibid. p. 229.

101. D p. 15.

102. Knud J.V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark, translated by Ivan Hill and Christopher Wade. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 114–116.

103. AVEIV p. 14.

104. Ibid. p. 20.

105. Rundetaarn (modern Danish Rundetårn). See Rough Guide to Denmark, by Lone Mouritsen, Roger Borum and Caroline Osborne Rough Guides. London: Penguin Books, 2010, p. 65, which considers it ‘the city's most intriguing landmark’, ‘built by Christian IV as part of the Trinitas complex’.

106. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74). Leading exponent of the German ‘Higher Criticism’ as applied to biblical texts, which resulted in the demythologising of them, as the very title of his most famous work Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, 1835–36) proclaims. His studies led him to the conclusion that in the Gospels the historical record had been substantially infiltrated by mythological material, and so there could be no reasonable case for regarding Jesus himself as divine. He studied and taught at Tübingen University. George Eliot's translation of Das Leben Jesu was crucial to her own philosophic development since she accepted its basic premise.

107. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–72), a follower of Hegel who, though starting out a student of Protestant theology, had by the age of 21 turned against religion itself and embarked on a radical programme of philosophical materialism. This necessitated analytical criticism of the Bible itself. Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830) and The Essence of Christianity (1841 pseudonymously, and under his own name 1843) gained many admirers, mostly for their cathartic demolition of ideas that had tended to atrophy in the 19th-century mind. George Eliot translated Feuerbach too, as Marian Evans – The Essence of Christianity, 1854–55 – and his ideas permeate her whole creative work. In less negative mode came Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 1843) which, written with the conviction that religion/Christianity has had a deleterious effect on human development, explains deities as products of fear and pleads for a philosophical acceptance of material reality.

108. See Jens Andersen, HCA, pp. 438–443. I find his argument largely persuasive.

109. MF-TL p. 187. Of Kierkegaard and their initially mutual bristly relations he writes: ‘Later I was better to understand this author who has shown me kindness and discretion as I have progressed.’

110. AVEIV p. 189.

111. Ibid. p. 189.

112. ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ (see Chapter 10) came out in Nye Eventyr og Historier Anden Række (New Fairy-Tales and Stories, Second Series) on 15 May 1858.

113. ‘The New Century's Muse’ (see Chapter 10) appeared in Nye Eventyr og Historier. Anden Række (New Fairy-Tales and Stories, Second Series) on 2 March 1861.

114. See Vanity Fair, Chapters XXV111–XXX111 inclusive for a portrait of Waterloo from both an un-heroic, ‘ordinary’ military perspective and a non-combatant one. Thackeray, in due course, would surely have read ‘To Be or Not to Be’.

115. The Charterhouse of Parma Chapters Three, Four and Five. Tolstoy in War and Peace – and in his earlier Sevastopol Sketches (1855) – is another point of comparison, Tolstoy having learned from The Charterhouse of Parma; the resemblances between Fabrice in the French novel and Pierre in the Russian, at this point, being easily apparent.

116. AVEIV p. 159.

117. Ibid. p. 163.

118. Ibid. p. 163.

119. D p. 247.

120. Ibid. pp. 254–255.

121. Ibid. p. 248.

122. See Michael Slater, Charles Dickens. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, and Clare Tomalin, Charles Dickens. London: Penguin Books, 2011. These two superb biographies are heartily to be recommended as portraits of Dickens, and by no means least in his familial relationships. For Dickens's relationship with Walter, see Slater, pp. 429–430, 441, 500 and 525–526, and Tomalin, pp. 273–274, 280–284, 320, 335. For relations with Andersen, see Slater, pp. 422–429, and Tomalin, p. 281.

123. Both quotes D pp. 254 and 262.

124. Bentley's Miscellany issue for August 1857.

125. The Frozen Deep. Though originally conceived and written by Wilkie Collins, Dickens – chief actor in the play, and stage manager – rather took the work over, as was his wont when in collaboration, and much of the dialogue, as reviewers realised, was his. The theme of the melodrama is the disappearance of the Franklin Expedition, the aim of which was to find the Northwest Passage, in July 1845. The production that Andersen attended on 4 July 1857 included not only Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their family, together with the Belgian King, but also Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, and W.M. Thackeray.

Chapter 10: What The Wind Tells Stories 1858–59

1. See Andersen's own Notes to his stories, dated September 1874, E og H Vol V p. 328; here he attributes adverse criticism principally to people enchanted by those fairy stories of his which they read when they themselves were young, and who, for extra-literary, purely personal reasons, cannot find the same magic in the same author's later offerings. He also thinks the great success of his fairy tales all over the world provoked hostile criticism whenever anything new from him appeared.

2. The text here is from Notes to Hans Christian Andersen: Complete Fairy-Tales and Stories translated by Erik Christian Haugaard. London: Gollancz, 1974, p. 1,082. For the Danish see E og H Vol V p. 322.

3. Haugaard op. cit. p. 1,083; in Danish, op. cit. p. 323.

4. E og H Vol III p. 162.

5. Ibid. pp. 169–170.

6. Ibid. p. 318.

7. Ibid. p. 212.

8. Haugaard, op. cit. p. 1,083; in Danish E og H Vol V p. 323.

9. E og H Vol II p. 313.

10. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) first used this phrase in his Principles of Biology (1864) with reference to Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin's own phrase being ‘natural selection’.

11. Haugaard, op. cit. p. 1,083; in Danish E og H Vol V p. 323.

12. E og H Vol III p. 201.

13. Ibid. p. 205.

14. Ibid. p. 207.

15. Ibid. p. 207.

16. Ibid. p. 278.

17. Ibid. p. 178.

18. Y by Y 1858.

19. From the additional chapters to the autobiography, dealing with the period April 1855 to December 1867, commissioned by Horace E. Scudder for his American edition (1871) The Fairy Tale of My Life, new edition. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, pp. 429–431.

20. Ibid. p. 431.

21. Exodus, chapter 2.

22. Lone Mouritsen, Roger Borum and Caroline Osborne Rough Guide to Denmark. London: RoughGuides/Penguin Books, 2010, pp. 252–264.

23. E og H Vol III p. 75.

24. Ibid. p. 81.

25. Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin edition, 1978, pp. 282–309.

26. ‘Der Froschkönig’, in Brothers Grimm, Kinder-und Hausmärchen, 1815 and 1857.

27. Log houses had long had an appeal for Andersen. An early poem of 1829, included in his Digte of 1830, honours them: ‘Ak, hvor romantisk smiler dog det Bjælkehuus i Dalen’, ‘Ah how romantic still smiles the log-house in the valley’.

28. See note 58 to Chapter 2.

29. See the chapter ‘The Old and the New Religion’, in Else Roesdahl, The Vikings translated from the Danish by Susan M. Margeson and Kirsten Williams. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1991, pp. 147–167.

30. In the 9th century, Egypt was largely ruled by Turks through a governor resident in Baghdad. This situation provoked rebellions in the country not only from the (Muslim) Egyptians but also from the (Christian) Copts.

31. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari. London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1958, p. 19.

32. ‘Bispen paa Børglum og hans Frænde’ (‘The Bishop of Børglum and His Kinsmen’, 1961). A superb evocation of the effect of a sinister, power-hungry prelate on his diocese and beyond, with vivid rendering of the coast of west Jutland. It has something of the detestation of the Middle Ages which we also find in Dickens.

33. Skagen is situated at the very tip of Jutland, where the Skaggerak (leading out to the North Sea) meets the Kattegat (leading into the Baltic). Beyond the little town are amazing sand dunes where the visitor can walk in order to view their convergence. Obviously this is a place much beset by harsh winds, rough seas, and storms involving shipwrecks. The harshness of life there gave the place the elemental appeal which so drew painters to it in the last third of the 19th century. See Rough Guide to Denmark, op. cit., pp. 257–262.

34. E og H Vol III p. 267.

35. Ibid. p. 315.

36. Quoted (her translation) in Patricia G. Berman, In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, p. 138.

37. P.S. Krøyer's 1888 painting ‘Hip, Hip, Hurrah!’ shows the Skagen painters at a merry outdoor dinner, at one with each other, their art and their surroundings (in fact not always the case) in a manner similar to Pierre-Auguste Renoir's celebrated Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–81.

38. E og H Vol III p. 294.

39. These powerful narrative paintings reproduced in Patricia G. Berman's study, op. cit. – Figs 102 and 103 – convey the harsh lives that Jørgen, his foster-father and his friend Morten lead, and some of the activities Andersen ascribes to them.

40. Holger Drachmann, Lars Kruse. En Skildring fra Virkelighedens og Sandets Regioner (Lars Kruse. A Story from the Regions of Reality and Sand, 1879). See Patricia G. Berman, op. cit., p. 142.

41. Berman, op. cit., p. 133.

42. This term has often been applied to the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller (1819–90), author of the long novel Die grüne Heinrich (Green Henry, 1854–55) and to the collection of novellas, Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyla, 1856) of which the most famous is the second, ‘Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe’ (‘A Village Romeo and Juliet’), with which ‘The Ice Maiden’ bears a distinct affinity. Also to the later novellen (1870s/1880s) of Theodor Storm (1817–88), set in his native Schleswig-Holstein. Though coined by the philosopher F.W. J. Schelling in 1802, the term was made current much later by the literary critic and playwright, Otto Ludwig (1813–65) in his essay, ‘Der poetische Realismus’. A work that merits this description ‘avoids the monotony of idealism on the one hand, and on the other … disentangles the confusions of realistic detail. A wealth of shrewd and sensitive observations of the world, however small, is reproduced by artistic means and techniques of style without sacrificing the sense of permanence which characterises human nature of all ages and environments.’ Henry and Mary Garland, Oxford Companion to German Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976, pp. 678–679.

Chapter 11: ‘Iijsjomfruen’, ‘The Ice Maiden’, 1861

1. E og H Vol IV p. 54.

2. Y by Y 1861.

3. See Chapter 2, note 75. Fearnley's large-scale oil on canvas, The Grindelwald Glacier, 1838, pays tribute to the great natural phenomenon that plays so determining a part in this tale. Likewise his painting of 1835, Near Meiringen, shows the landscape near Rudy's grandfather's home – on pp. 83 and 93, respectively, of In Front of Nature: The European Landscapes of Thomas Fearnley. For more on the relationship between Scandinavian and Swiss painters, see Chapter 2, note 16 and Christoper Riopelle with Sarah Herring, Forests, Rocks, Torrents. London: National Gallery Co, distributed by Yale University Press, 2011.

4. E og H Vol IV p. 56.

5. Canton Valais/Wallis is in south-western Switzerland and contains the valley of the Rhône from its sources down to its entry into the Lake of Geneva. Its administrative centre is Sion. Some of the very highest and most famous Swiss peaks are here, notably the Matterhorn. French is the majority language of the more populous eastern section, amounting to over 60% of the whole canton. It is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and in 1845 joined the Sonderbund.

6. The German-speaking Bernese Oberland refers to the Alpine region round Lakes Thun and Brienz, and contains such much-visited towns as Interlaken, Adelboden, Wengen, Mürren, Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald and Meiringen.

7. E og H Vol IV p. 61.

8. Ibid. p. 56.

9. Ibid. p. 67.

10. Ibid. p. 67.

11. The Jungfrau, 4,158 m (13,642 ft) high, the Mönch (Monk) at 4,107 m (13,474 ft) and the Eiger (Ogre) at 3,970 m (13,020 ft), constitute a tremendous alpine massif overlooking the Bernese Oberland; the Jungfrau is spectacularly visible from Interlaken. The notorious and – in the history of climbing, only too frequently fatal – north face of the Eiger, with its formidable glaciers, rises above Grindelwald.

12. The Föhn is a strong, dry, down-slope alpine wind that occurs on the lee side of mountains. The Eiger is a notorious cradle for it, making attempts at ascent particularly dangerous. Capable of melting snow and starting wildfires, the Föhn can have severely deletrious effects on the human nervous system, compounding psychoses and suicidal feelings.

13. E og H Vol IV p. 70.

14. Ibid. p. 71.

15. Ibid. p. 71.

16. Ibid. pp. 75–76.

17. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998.

18. Canton Vaud spans Lake Neuchâtel and the whole northern shore of Lake Geneva, and thus also stretches from the Alps to the Jura. The third most populous Swiss canton, it is French-speaking and has a long history of vigorous Protestantism. It was an active opponent of the Sonderbund. Today, because of Southern European immigrants, the balance has been redressed, with about 34% of Vaudois now Catholic.

19. E og H Vol IV p. 81.

20. Ibid. p. 83.

21. Ibid. p. 62.

22. Ibid. p. 62.

23. Ibid. p. 63.

24. Ibid. p. 68.

25. Ibid. p. 68.

26. Ibid. pp. 87–88.

27. Ibid. p. 89. Both parts of the exchange.

28. Ibid. p. 89.

29. Ibid. p. 98.

30. Ibid. p. 100.

31. Schiller's Wilhelm Tell – its plot taken from, among other sources, the Chronicum Helvetium – is imbued with ideals of freedom and honour of the 18th century post-French Revolution. Tell has killed a bloodthirsty tyrant, but does not necessarily approve of bloodshed, and certainly refuses to welcome the assassin of the Austrian Emperor. He helps him to escape only on condition that he expiates his sin. Rossini's opera had a French-language libretto based on Schiller's play.

32. See J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of Europe. London: Penguin Books, 1997 especially pp. 361–162 and 373; Leo Schelbert, Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007, passim; Wilhelm Oechsli, History of Switzerland 1499–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.

33. E og H Vol III p. 101.

34. Ibid. p. 102.

35. Allan Woodcourt, surgeon, who marries the heroine Esther Summerson, in Bleak House, and Daniel Doyce, engineer, in Little Dorrit.

36. All phrases in the paragraph E og H Vol 1V pp. 102–103.

37. Ibid. p. 104.

38. Ibid. p. 104.

39. From The Fairy Tale of My Life as commissioned by Horace E. Scudder for his American edition of 1871, new edition. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, p. 464

40. E og H Vol IV p. 106.

41. Château de Chillon stands on an island off the shores of Lake Geneva 3 km from Montreux. The Swiss patriot François de Bonivard (1493–1570) was imprisoned there, in a dungeon, by the Duke of Savoy in 1530 but released, by the Bernese, in 1536.

42. From ‘The Sonnet of Chillon’. Visiting Chillon in June 1816 with his friend Shelley, Lord Byron was inspired to write this sonnet, which in turn inspired him to write a long narrative poem about Bonivard, as hero in the cause of liberty: ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, to which the sonnet acts as an introduction. The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems was published by John Murray in December 1816.

43. E og H Vol III p. 112. Both parts of the exchange.

44. Ibid. p. 113.

45. Ibid. p. 113.

46. Ibid. p. 119.

47. Ibid. p. 121.

48. Ibid. p. 121.

49. Ibid. p. 123.

50. Ibid. p. 124.

51. Ibid. p. 124.

52. Ibid. p. 127. Both parts of the exchange.

53. Ibid. p. 127.

54. In Nye Eventyr og Historier Anden Række (New Fairy-Tales and Stories, Second Series), published 2 March 1861. ‘The Ice Maiden’ would be included in Nye Eventyr og Historier. Anden Række. Anden Samling (Fairy-Tales and Stories. Second Series. Second Collection), published 25 November 1861.

55. E og H Vol IV p. 47.

56. Ibid. p. 50.

57. Ibid. . p. 50.

58. Vera Gancheva, ‘“The Toll of Andersen's Bell” – From Neo-Platonism to New Age – Ways of Understanding and Appreciating the Great Writer's Spirituality’, in Johan de Mylius, Aage Jørgensen and Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen (eds), Hans Christian Andersen Between Children's Literature and Adult Literature: Papers from the Fourth International Hans Chrsitian Andersen Conference. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2007, pp. 570–584.

59. ibid p 578.

60. E og H Vol IV, p. 52.

61. Ibid. p. 53.

62. Y by Y 1863.

63. Y by Y 1863.

64. D p. 307.

65. Jonas Collin, junior (1840–1905) zoologist. Son of Edvard and Jette Collin.

66. Y by Y 1861.

67. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) Norwegian poet, playwright and novelist and a cultural figure of such influence that he earned himself the name of ‘uncrowned king of Norway’, and became the first Scandinavian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature – in 1903, an honour denied Ibsen and Strindberg, who were both alive at the time. He wrote stories of life among country peasants; Synnøve Solbakken (1857) is one of the best known. Like Ibsen's, Bjørnson's plays moved from being historical dramas recreating the Nordic past to attempts to portray contemporary life and its problems. These include comedies and plays scrutinising man's life in society, and dealing with representative yet individualised men and women; De Nygifte (The Newly Married Couple, 1865) broke new ground at the time. It seems regrettable but inevitable that this and subsequent work should always be compared to Ibsen, and to Bjørnson's detriment. Like Ibsen, too, Bjørnson later moved in his drama towards symbolism and what one can only call spirituality: Over Ævne (Del 1) (Beyond Human Power (Part 1), 1883) concerns a clergyman who believes he has the power to perform miracles; OverÆvne (Del 2) (Beyond Human Power (Part 2) 1895) deals with some of the same characters facing the problems of capital and labour.

68. D p. 280.

69. Ibid. p. 283.

70. Ibid. p. 283.

71. Diary entry for 25 March 1863, quoted in Y by Y 1863.

72. In Spain was published on 9 November 1863, and has always been the least regarded of Andersen's travelogues. Andersen's work was hardly known in Spain at that time.

73. D p. 298.

74. See in particular W. Glyn Jones, Denmark: A Modern History. London: Croom Helm, 1986, pp. 39–45 and 59–62; Knud J.V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 22–26 and 66–70.

75. Y by Y 1864. D pp. 309–310.

76. Knud V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark translated by Ivan Hill and Christopher Wade. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 25.

Chapter 12: Beginnings and Endings. From ‘Dryaden’ (‘The Dryad’) to ‘Tante Tandpine’ (‘Auntie Toothache’)

1. George Brandes (1842–1927) was the most influential Danish critic of his time, not only in Denmark/Scandinavia but all over Europe. Espousing Realism and Naturalism at the outset of his brilliant, continuously high-profile career, he was the consistent enemy of any atrophying or reactionary tendencies in both society and literature, waging war against all retreats into aestheticism and fantasy and involving himself in radical movements both inside and outside the arts. He was a friend and champion of Ibsen, a self-proclaimed follower of Hippolyte Taine, and his 1871 lectures – Hovedstrømninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (Main Currents in 19th Century Literature) – later the title of his major four-volume study of European literature (1872–75) – are generally credited with starting the forward-looking Danish literary movement: Det moderne Gennembrud (The Modern Breakthrough, see notes 52 and 60 of this chapter). His belief in progress for humanity – and possibly his espousal of the works of Nietzsche, whose currency can, to a great extent, be attributed to him – led him to fight shy of the results of practical socialism, and later in life to espouse an ‘aristocratic radicalism’ based on the thought of great, if sometimes aloof, spirits. W. Glyn Jones in his introduction to his translation of Georg Brandes: Selected Letters (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1990), writes: ‘With the exception of Hans Christian Andersen there can be few Danes who have had such a wide circle of international friends and acquaintances. Brandes’ range from Stuart Mill to Kropotkin, from minor Scandinavian politicians to Georges Clemenceau, from J[ens] P[eter] Jacobsen to Verhaeren, from Ibsen to Shaw. He received vast numbers of letters – between 30 and 40 a day at one stage. Writers deluged him with their works, hoping for a (positive) review, while universities sought him as a distinguished lecturer. … For all his deference to Taine, Brandes knew that he himself was brilliant, and it was a constant source of irritation and frustration to him that he was tied to a minor language like Danish, much as he loved it for its intrinsic values' (p. 12). Glyn Jones also admits, apropos of Brandes's move from Copenhagen to Berlin and then back (1877–83), and the numerous controversies and quarrels which marked his career: ‘It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that in some perverse way Brandes enjoyed being in conflict. He was soon the enfant terrible of the Danish literary scene: appalled by the conservatism and lack of vision by which he was surrounded on all sides. … Yet [in Berlin] he soon became aware of reactionary forces, and here, too, he created enemies as well as friends. He was finally prevailed upon to return to Copenhagen when friends and admirers secured a financial basis on which he could continue’ (p. 8). His personal life was as tumultuous, marked by marital and sexual/emotional conflicts, involving an affair with the Swedish novelist Victoria Benedictsson that ended with her suicide in 1888, for which Society talk blamed him. Though this event scarred him publicly, he remained a relentless and controversial fighter for sexual freedom. He was also a bitter and outspoken opponent of the First World War and of the imperialism motivating both sides. See also Johan de Mylius: ‘The Andersen Legacy: Georg and Edvard Brandes in Dispute on H.C. Andersen’ in H.C. Andersen Old Problems and New Readings, editor Steven P. Sondrup. Odense and Proo, Utah: The Hans Christian Andersen Centre, The University Press of Southern Denmark, Brigham Young University, 2004.

2. Y by Y 1868.

3. Andersen's Notes: Hans Christian Andersen: Complete Fairy Tales and Stories translated by Erik Christian Haugaard. London: Gollancz, 1974, p. 1,092. E og H Vol V, pp. 334–335.

4. E og H Vol V p. 63.

5. Ibid. p. 63.

6. The eponymous Great Sea-Serpent is, of course, the great underwater telegraph cable that connects Europe and America. But, in similar fashion to his technique in the aquarium episode of ‘The Dryad’, Andersen imaginatively views this revolutionary human achievement through the eyes of the fishes and cetaceans that encounter it. The story first appeared in Illustreret Tidende on 17 December with the significant subtitle Et Nutids-Eventyr (A Contemporary Fairy Tale).

7. www.expositions-universelles.fr/1867-exposition. Roger Price, The French Second Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 210–249.

8. E og H Vol V p. 70.

9. Andersen's Notes, Haugaard, op.cit., note 3, p. 1,092. E og H Vol V p. 335.

10. Y by Y 1866.

11. E og H Vol V p. 67.

12. Ibid. p. 66.

13. Ibid. p. 67.

14. Ibid. p. 67.

15. Ibid. p. 67.

16. Ibid. pp. 69–70.

17. Ibid. p. 72.

18. Ibid. p. 73.

19. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1. ‘The Burial of the Dead’), line 60, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1969, p. 62.

20. ‘What the Whole Family Said’. In one house live two families, and, above them, on the attic floor, nearest to Heaven, the godfather of the youngest of all the children there, little Marie. All agree with him, despite their own fantasies and favourite stories, that life itself is the best fairy tale of all, but it takes him – a ‘stand-in’ for the author – to tell them that all the fairy-tale wonders of the world (and of the human brain) are contained in his favourite among his many books, the Bible, which endeared itself to him after he had endured so many trials. It is a rather dull tale, unrelieved by any really interesting touches, though there is charm in the picture of the children. It appeared in Eventyr og Historier. Ny Samling (Fairy Tales and Stories. New Collection) on 30 March 1872.

21. ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, lines 71–77. This long narrative poem was published in book form in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems in 1880.

22. L'église de la Madeleine – a neoclassical building – was originally a monument to la Grande Armée. But after the fall of Napoleon it was decided that it should become a church and it was consecrated in 1842. Requiem masses for many famous men of the arts have been held here, e.g. for Chopin in 1849. Andersen, by using the church, is signalling the uneasy conflation of the statist, the glamorous and the sacred.

23. Mabille. This dance hall and the garden it stood in (Jardin Mabille) were named for a dancing-teacher, Père Mabille, who owned land just off the Champs Elysées, and opened it as a dancing-space for his pupils. His more ambitious sons took it over in 1844, and made it a widely sought place of public entertainment; in the middle decades of the century it acquired a sexy reputation, in both senses of the word.

24. Carlos, José and Jorge O'Neill were sons of the Danish Consul in Lisbon, who had lived in Denmark for four years in the 1820s and stayed with the Wulffs, at whose home Andersen met them. His stay with them in Portugal was only an indifferent success, as Andersen wanted to see places in his own time and on his own terms, while José wanted to whisk him round on proper sightseeing tours, as if, thought Andersen, he were an Englishman.

25. All quotes Y by Y 1866.

26. Robert Watt (1837–94) was a writer and journalist, editor of Figaro and Dagens Nyheder (Daily News), and later a managing director of Copenhagen's Tivoli. His lively, rakish journalist's temperament had considerable appeal for Andersen, and Jackie Wullschlager in her biography says shrewdly that Andersen found him a salutary antidote to the class-conscious younger sons of the Collin family.

27. The whole book was published on 19 November 1868.

28. D p. 330.

29. Y by Y 1867 for both May and September quotes.

30. Y by Y 1868.

31. Einar Drewsen (1833–73), son of Adolph and Ingeborg Drewsen, Edvard Collin's brother-in-law and sister. Andersen's relationship with him must surely have been a complex one, in its movement from mutual irritation to an unusual degree of mutual confidence from an older man to a younger one, including, in many writers' opinion, Jackie Wullschlager's for instance, revelations about homosexual practices. Later Einar clearly had a major breakdown, necessitating care in a famous Norwegian hospital catering for mental illness, Oringe Mental Hospital near Vordingborg. Andersen was much concerned with his welfare, and before and after Einar's premature death – at the age of 40 – wrote some of his most caring and selfless letters, to his sister Jonna, perhaps his favourite among all Jonas Collin's grandchildren.

32. Y by Y 1866.

33. Jens Andersen HCA p. 466.

34. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907). Originally associated with Zola and the Naturalists, Huysmans is most famous for his provocative novel À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884) the hero of which, Des Esseintes, pursues unusual sensations and rejects the bourgeois world as stifling, tedious, unspiritual. It became a cult book with the decadents, and, in England, with Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes.

35. Aage Jørgensen, ‘Hans Christian Andersen between Rootedness and Modernity, with Special Reference to His Fairy Tale, “The Dryad”’ (2005), in Hans Christian Andersen between Children's Literature and Adult Literature, Papers from the Fourth International Hans Christian Andersen Conference edited by Johan de Mylius, Aage Jørgensen and Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2007, pp. 199–215.

36. Edmond (1822–96) and Jules (1830–70) de Goncourt were art critics and collectors, social commentators and novelists who developed and propagated the roman documentaire, which necessitated massive research and to which they themselves made distinguished contributions. The remarkable harmony of interest, ability and temperament between the brothers enabled them to write the Journal together for which posterity best honours them, the enterprise being continued by Edmond after Jules's death from syphilis, which he'd agonisingly and precisely described. They knew and associated with many of the most interesting French writers and intellectuals of their time, dining with them, discoursing and arguing with them, recording their percipient remarks, their flaws, their inconsistencies. They proclaimed themselves ‘John-the-Baptists of modern neuroses’, a self-designation that has, over the years, both impressed and repelled simultaneously.

37. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, edited, translated and with an introduction by Robert Baldick; Foreword by Geoff Dyer. New York Review of Books, 2007, pp. 7–8.

38. Ibid. p. 30.

39. Ibid. p. 60.

40. Serialised in L'Artiste earlier in the year, the novel was published in December 1867, and brought Zola virtually immediate critical attention and, as the reprints testify, commercial success as well, enough to enable him to embark on his ambitious literary project. This was the famous 20-volume Rougon-Macquart sequence which began with La Fortune des Rougon in 1871. In a long letter he wrote to Bjørnson on 8 February 1878, Brandes declared: ‘Zola is brutal, audacious, so ruthless. … But he is a true genius. Just read La fortune des Rougon.’ Georg Brandes: Selected Letters edited and translated by W. Glyn Jones. Norwich: Norvik Press, 1990, p. 78.

41. Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin, translated by Andrew Rothwell. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008, p. 26.

42. See Robert Baldick, Dinner at Magny's (new edition). Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus, 2006. The literary critic Saint-Beuve and Brandes's admired Hippolyte Taine – critic, philosopher, historian, anti-romantic, Positivist and Determinist – were prime movers of these influential gatherings. Taine was the author of a seminal work of literary criticism, Histoire de la literature anglaise (1863), and, after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Origines de la France contemporaine (1873–93).

43. Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin, op. cit., pp. 1–2.

44. As observed in Chapter 4, see note 6, there seem to me decided similarities of both theme and treatment between Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and Andersen's O.T., and their delicate but sophisticatedly skilled art, taken together with their overlap in time, has sufficient in common to make one think it likely that Turgenev read and admired at least some of Andersen's work. Turgenev was an influence on the Danish novelist J.P. Jacobsen (see note 52 below).

45. For Brandes's criticism in Illustreret Tidende, look under these two proper names on www.andersen.sdu.dk.

46. Andersen's Notes, E og H Vol V pp. 335–336. Marie Grubbe's scandalous life with its highs and lows, and its touching that of Holberg, has fascinated other writers and artists as well as Andersen and Jacobsen. The Danish composer Ebbe Hamerik (1898–1951) made an opera of her life, Maria Grubbe (1940).

47. As for note 45 above.

48. Epistler (Epistles) appeared in five volumes, 1748–54. See Sven Hakon Rossel (ed.) Ludwig Holberg, a European Writer: A Study in Influence and Reception. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994, esp. pp. 67–103.

49. E og H Vol V p. 112.

50. Ibid. p. 118.

51. Ibid. p. 118.

52. J[ens) P[eter] Jacobsen (1847–85). Perhaps the leading creative writer of Det moderne Gennembrud (see note 1 to this chapter) and the writer who initiated Naturalism – and who significantly presented and translated Darwin to a Danish readership. Born in Jutland, Jacobsen was divided even as a boy in his interests in natural sciences, especially botany, and literature; he wrote poems when young. His ambition was to bring into his imaginative work the wonders of Nature as apprehended by science. (He always admired Andersen's tales for their feeling for the natural world, particularly flowers.) Georg Brandes, ever his enthusiastic admirer and advocate, described him in a letter to Bjørnson (Georg Brandes: Selected Letters edited and translated by W. Glyn Jones Norwich: Norvik Press, 1990, p. 76) as ‘a quiet little Jutlandic farmer's son (his father is actually a boat-builder, but his cultural background is entirely that of a farmer) so closely tied to Denmark that he has always felt half in despair when he has been beyond its borders… ’ For all this apparent lack of sophistication, he became the first Danish translator of Darwin's major works. In 1872 he produced a Naturalist novella of extraordinary artistic perfection, Mogens. Fru Marie Grubbe took him four years to bring to the excellence he sought. By this time he had learned that he had advanced tuberculosis, and had little time left. In 1880 he published one of Denmark's supreme modern (modernist) classics, Niels Lyhne, a novel, admired by Ibsen and by both Brandes brothers and which had incalculable effect not only on contemporary and subsequent Danish writers but on Rilke, Freud, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig and both D.H. and T.E. Lawrence. Jacobsen's sensitivity and his intellectual courage – he was a committed atheist – proved irresistible. From Niels Lyhne Frederick Delius created his opera Fennimore and Gerda (1908–10, but it was delayed by the war until 1919), writing the libretto himself.

53. Fru Marie Grubbe. The first modern Danish novel, despite its historical setting, was published in full in 1876.

54. E og H Vol V p. 119.

55. Ibid. p. 99.

56. Ibid. p. 107.

57. Ibid. pp. 110–111.

58. Translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen in her introduction to her translation of Marie Grubbe. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1918 (republished London: Forgotten Books, 2012). www.forgottenbook.org.

59. Jacobsen produced the first complete versions in Danish of Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man in 1876.

60. Spearheaded by Brandes's lecture and publications on currents in 19th-century European literature, the writers who loosely formed this movement were dominant for the rest of the 1870s, and during the 1880s and 1890s, radical in politics and social thought, in the question of women and sexual standards, and defiant of orthodoxy in religion and artistic (and even personal) criteria. As it was a Scandinavia-wide movement, writers from all three countries can be included: Brandes and Jacobsen from Denmark, and also Holger Drachmann (1846–1908) and Herman Bang (1857–1912); from Norway Ibsen and Bjørnson (though the movement cannot adequately contain them), Jonas Lie (1833–1908), Alexander Kielland (1849–1906), Arne Garborg (1851–1924) and Amalie Skram (1847–1905) who later lived in Denmark; from Sweden, Strindberg (to a certain extent), the eminent educationalist and feminist Ellen Key (1849–1926) and Brandes's lover, Victoria Benedictsson (1850–88). See Hans Hertel, Det stadig moderne gennembrud: Georg Brandes og hans tid, set fra det 21. århundrede (The Steady Modern Breakthrough: Georg Brandes and his Time, seen from the 21st Century). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004.

61. Georg Brandes Selected Letters edited and translated by W. Glyn Jones. Norwich: Norvik Press, 1990, p. 66.

62. Ibid. p. 76.

63. E og H Vol V. p. 127.

64. Ibid. p. 134.

65. LP. p. 73.

66. Ibid. p. 50.

67. Hamlet (1868) by Ambroise Thomas (1811–96), composer of the successful Mignon (1865), had a libretto based on a version of Shakespeare's play by Alexandre Dumas père, concentrating, fashionably, as Lucky Peer makes clear, on the character of Ophelia, and with a striking Mad Scene. Long neglected, it has appealed to late 20th-century/21st-century audiences, and there was a successful revival at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 2010.

68. Zukunftsmusik – a preoccupation of this novella. In the earlier and longer essay, ‘The Artwork of the Future’, Wagner stressed the need of the Volk, the people, in the present-day vacuum, for an art form that united, synthesised all the arts into a revolutionary whole. The 1861 essay – originally published in a French translation the year before – summarises and restates his previous precepts. In it he praises Weber as the first true German opera-composer and Beethoven as the supreme symphonist. The musician is for him something of a mystic – communicating the ‘thing unspeakable’, ‘the untold mystery’.

69. La Dame blanche (The White Lady, 1825) was the most successful opera of François Boieldieu (1775–1834). Its libretto, by Eugène Scribe, derives from two Scott novels, Guy Mannering (1815) and The Monastery (1820). A young English lieutenant visiting Scotland becomes godfather to the youngest child of his friends, Dickson and Jenny, tenants of a haunted castle. The castle's ghost is a White Lady, a friend to her own sex against fickle men. Dickson is summoned to meet the ‘ghost’ but George valiantly takes his place. Though she is an imposter – employed by the false owner of the castle to impersonate the legendary spectre for his own purposes – Anna, the White Lady, is also a good, honourable woman whom George knew years back when they were both children. Eventually the falsification of affairs is unravelled, and George himself turns out to be the heir to the castle, and marries the White Lady. Perhaps the theme of inheritance being belatedly accorded to a virtuous, comparatively obscure, individual had significance for both Andersen and Peer.

70. Lohengrin dates from 1850, but is imbued with the revolutionary sentiments and ideals of freedom of 1848/49 and drawn from a medieval German romance about Parsifal's son, the Knight of the Swan, which had obvious personal appeal for Andersen. Lohengrin is borne down the river Scheldt to Antwerp by a swan in answer to the prayers of Elsa, daughter of the Duke of Brabant, falsely accused of fratricide. The only condition he gives for aiding her against her enemies is that she never ask him his provenance, family or name. Lohengrin fights – and spares – Elsa's principal accuser, he and she fall in love, and preparations for the wedding get under way. But then Elsa's enemies taunt her for not knowing her husband-to-be's identity, and, her confidence undermined, she puts the forbidden question to him. Lohengrin once again fights and now kills Elsa's enemy, but, because of the broken promise, the power of the Holy Grail demands he leaves Antwerp. But he performs one more service for Elsa. The swan that brought him to her was Elsa's brother transformed. He effects his release from the spell, while himself returning upriver in a boat pulled by a dove. But the double shock has been too much for Elsa and she dies in her re-found brother's arms.

71. LP p. 81.

72. Ibid. p. 73.

73. Ibid. p. 31.

74. Ibid. p. 43.

75. Niels Gade (1817–90). Born in Copenhagen and working as an orchestral musician there, he submitted his first symphony to Mendelssohn in Leipzig. Mendelssohn was much impressed and conducted its first performance in 1843. Gade became friends with Mendelssohn, taught at the Leipzig Conservatory, and was assistant conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with the distinction of conducting the premiere of Mendelssohn's probably most famous work, his Violin Concerto (1844). The war between Denmark and Prussia forced Gade to return to Denmark in 1848, and from then on he was the dominant figure in Danish musical life, Director of Copenhagen Music Society until his death. He married Emma, the daughter of composer Hartmann in 1852. He wrote eight symphonies of a Mendelssohnian stamp, and among his many other compositions none is more beautiful than the secular cantata Elverskud which so impresses Peer.

76. LP pp. 48–49.

77. Ibid. p. 57.

78. Ibid. p. 57.

79. Beethoven: ‘From the Sketch-Books: Notes on the Pastoral Symphony’, in Beethoven Letters, Journals and Conversations, edited, translated and introduced by Michael Hamburger. London: Thames & Hudson, 1951.

80. Robert Simpson, Beethoven Symphonies, London: BBC Music Guides, 1970, pp. 41–43.

81. LP p. 63.

82. Ibid. p. 71.

83. Ibid. p. 75.

84. Ibid. p. 76.

85. See Chapter 4, ‘The Master Thinker of Bayreuth’ of Part III, ‘The Artistic Revolution’, in Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941) New York Doubleday: Anchor Books, 1958, p. 273.

86. LP p. 76.

87. Y by Y 1855.

88. Andersen describes this visit in the supplement to his autobiography, The Fairy-Tale of My Life as commissioned by Horace E. Scudder for his American edition of 1871, new edition. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000: ‘Wagner impressed me fully as having a most genial nature, and it was a most happy hour, – such a one as I have never had since, p. 417.

89. LP p. 89.

90. Ibid. p. 90.

91. D p. 366.

92. ‘The Jumpers’ – from the year before ‘The Shadow’ – is one of Andersen's most delightful and subtle tales, one which leaves us pleasurably and thought-provokingly unsure how to take it. The flea, the grasshopper and the skipjack (‘Springgaaset’) hold a public competition as to who can jump the highest. The prize will be the king's daughter. Each competitor is sure he will be the winner. The flea jumps so high that he disappears, and watcher says he hasn't jumped at all; the grasshopper, who proudly claims descent from Ancient Egypt and now lives in a little toy house made of cards, jumps right into the king's face – which irritates him. But the skipjack – made of a goose's wishbone, two rubber bands, some sealing wax and a mahogany stick – jumps, after a pause, right into the lap of the princess herself. So how can he not be proclaimed victor? The flea, who knows that his jump was the highest, takes himself off to join a foreign army, among whom, it's said, he dies. But the grasshopper contemplates the whole episode and decides that in the world it's appearances that count. He then starts his own beautiful sad song, and the last sentence tells us that the author has heard the whole story from him. This story arose, Andersen tells us in his Notes, spontaneously to meet the request of some children.

93. D p. 367: ‘Peter Koch thought Lucky Peer shouldn't have died but experienced adversity and yet remained Lucky Peer’.

94. LP p. 68.

95. As in D p. 367: ‘our age has no use for weakness, but strength’.

96. Carl Nielsen (1865–1931). Denmark's greatest and most famous composer, was born, like Andersen, in Fyn, to a poor peasant family living south of Odense, where there is now a museum to him next to Andersen's own. Nielsen's six symphonies – of which the admirable first two are clearly post-Brahmsian compositions – are original, deeply thought works, each an independent artefact following its own organic laws. Carl Nielsen was much concerned with progressive tonality, reflecting the idea that his works should externalise, argue out and resolve inner conflicts while remaining ‘pure’ music, like the symphonies of his contemporary fellow Nordic, Sibelius. Nielsen's journey from obscurity to world fame is as remarkable as Andersen's. At 14 he was playing bugle and alto trombone for the army's 16th Battalion at Odense, and then went to Copenhagen to study at the Royal Academy in 1884. In 1891 he married Anne Marie Brodersen, a sculptor who became very famous in her own right. It was a difficult marriage, Brodersen devoting herself to her work at the expense of her family, Nielsen having a number of affairs, including one with his children's nanny, which brought about a marital hiatus of eight years. His popular opera Maskerade (Masquerade), with a libretto based on Holberg, was first performed at Andersen's beloved Kongelige Teater, Copenhagen on 11 November 1906. He wrote – partly in emulation of Andersen – a delightful, though not always accurate, memoir of his childhood, Min Fynske Barndom (My Childhood on Fyn 1927). He wrote incidental music to Oehlenschläger's Aladdin (1919), and one of his most enchanting works is his secular cantata, Fynsk Forår (Springtime in Fyn, 1922). See Daniel M. Grimley Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010.

97. See Elias Bredsdorff HCA p. 274. Entry for 22 May 1875: ‘Now Jonas came, helped me to put on warm, dry clothes; I lay back in bed very feeble. Jonas spent the night here, staying in the front room.’

98. Letter of 5 September 1870: see Y by Y 1870.

99. The Franco-Prussian War. See Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–1871. London: Penguin Books, 2007; Geoffrey Wahro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870–1871. London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1961.

100. In Eventyr og Historier. Ny Samling. (Fairy-Tales and Stories. New Collection). For detailed presentation of its many features see Tatar AA pp. 298–305 (as ‘The Most Astonishing Thing’).

101. E og H Vol V p. 175.

102. Ibid. p. 177.

103. Ibid. p. 177.

104. Ibid. p. 177.

105. Ibid. p. 179.

106. Ibid. p. 180.

107. Ibid. p. 182.

108. The Melchiors and the Henriques were two extremely rich and exceptionally cultured and refined Jewish families with whom Andersen became friendly – and of whom indeed he was a frequent house-guest – in the mid-1860s. Moritz Melchior (1816–84), a merchant in tea, coffee and sugar, had married Dorothea (1823–85) the sister of Martin Henriques (1825–1912), husband of Therese (1833–82), a talented musician. In addition to grand Copenhagen residences, the two families had fine villas outside the city – the Melchiors at Rolinghed (‘Tranquillity’), with lovely gardens going down to the sea and fine views over the Øresund of Sweden, and the Henriques not far off at Petershøi. Hospitable over the years to a whole range of interesting international writers, composers, artists – Bournonville, Gade, Ibsen, Edmund Gosse among others – they were extremely sympathetic to Andersen's temperament and needs, and he was devoted to both families, being particularly close to the two wives. Jackie Wullschlager, who writes exceptionally well about them – and their relationship to and with Andersen – says, surely truly, ‘Like him, the Melchiors and the Henriques stood at the heart of Copenhagen society and yet felt themselves to be outsiders. Their Jewishness set them apart; swarthy, dark-haired and dark-eyed, the two families looked different from most Danes …’ Jackie Wullschlager HCA p. 391 – and we have seen throughout this study the strong, deep-rooted affinity Andersen consistently felt with Jewish people.

109. Y by Y 1872.

110. For example, at the very outset of his German travels of 1831, while preparing for his first important book, he was writing in his diary for 18 May: ‘My teeth are monstrously painful. The nerves are in fact delicate tangents that imperceptible movements of air play upon, and that's why those teeth are playing the devil with me – first piano, then crescendo, all the melodies of pain at every shift in the weather.’ D p. 25.

111. Elias Bredsdorff HCA p. 265. The beauty of this translation couldn't be surpassed.

112. E og H Vol V p. 288.

113. Ibid. p. 298.

114. Ibid. p. 303.

115. ‘Nattergalen’, ‘The Nightingale’ appeared in Nye Eventyr. Første Bind. Første Samling (New Fairy-Tales. First Volume. First Collection) on 11 November 1843.

116. ‘Hun duede ikke’, ‘She Was No Good’ first appeared in December 1852 in the Danish Folk Calendar for 1853.