From the very start Andersen’s fairy tales were popular among the Danish reading public. Although the first reviews were often unappreciative, Andersen rarely had reason to be dissatisfied with professional criticisms. Andersen was widely received abroad, gaining fame and notoriety across Europe. Andersen’s primary influence on modern literature remains his collection of fairy tales; read widely by children and adults in a multitude of languages, they have achieved the distinction of inspiration for artists of all sorts. A thin-skinned demeanor that left him at the mercy of many contemporary critics plagued Andersen, throughout his life, and early failures left their mark in the form of constant self-doubt and insecurity. By no means the first writer to introduce the tales to the aristocracy, it was Andersen’s unique narrative style and background that poignantly displayed characters of universal wisdom and appeal. Andersen’s most influential contemporary was Charles Dickens and named authors like Shakespeare and E.T.A. Hoffmann as influential in his work. His meager beginnings and early failures caused Andersen to crave the reception both at home and abroad achieved by his literary idols.
Hans Christian Anderson, though a remarkably prolific writer in a number of different genres, will always be remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen invented what the last two centuries have called ‘children’s literature,’ but after some early stories he is no more available just to children than are the early works of Perrault or Basile. Rather, Andersen expressed clear distaste for the “Pied Piper myth which was to engulf his reputation” (Wullschlager 5). When, just before his death in 1875, he saw a design of a statue to commemorate him, which showed him surrounded by children: “I said loud and clear that I was dissatisfied,” he wrote in his diary, “that I didn’t tolerate anyone standing behind me and I never had children on my lap or between my legs, that my tales were just as much for older people as for children, who only understood the outer trappings and did not comprehend and take in the whole work until they were mature—that naivety was only part of my tales, that humor was what really gave them flavor” (Wullschlager 5). All his biographers stress that there were two of him, the Dane in Denmark, vulnerable and obsessed by supposed under-appreciation, and the showman abroad, the wunderkind of Weimar and of London.
Anderson, born the son of a poor Danish shoemaker in the early nineteenth century, expresses his fascination with the literary works of Shakespeare from an early age. His early admiration for English writers Shakespeare and Walter Scott had a great importance in the forming of his works, he even borrowed the names of the two authors to form his first pseudonym: William Christian Walter (Bredsdorff 11). His lower social background plagued Andersen well into his adult life and expressed itself in the frustrations and successes of each of his characters. His roots among common people were at first a handicap but proved to be his fortune as an artist. Andersen called one of his memoirs "The Fairy Tale of My Life," making clear how painful his emergence was from the working class of Denmark in the early 19th century. The driving purpose of his career was to win fame and honor while not forgetting how hard the way up had been. Writes one modern day journalist: “Among his contemporaries, Andersen can be situated between Dickens, who dropped the Dane after he overstayed his welcome on what became a five-week visit, and Tolstoy, who loved the simplicity and directness of Andersen's narrative mode” (Bloom). A major writer of the Danish Golden Age, Andersen craved the celebrity and acceptance that these two writers had achieved.
It was contemporary criticism in his native land that was most scathing and unforgiving. Published in 1838, the work by Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard, Af en Endnu Levendes Papirer (From the Papers of a Person Still Alive). This work is an extended review of Andersen's novel Only a Fiddler, published in 1837. According to Kierkegaard, the fiddler's hopeless struggle is a reflection of Hans Christian Andersen's own grudge against the world: 'Andersen's fundamental idea [is] dissatisfaction with the world:'
(...) displeased and dissatisfied as he is with the real world, he tries to gain vicarious satisfaction in his own timid poetic creations. Like Lafontaine, therefore, he sits and cries over his unhappy heroes, who are doomed to perish, and why? Because Andersen is the man he is. The same joyless fight that Andersen himself has fought in life is now repeated in his poetry. (HCA Center)
Kierkgaard regards Andersen’s novel of lacking any real genius and contends he merely bows to the disapproval of others and writes for his critics, thus lacking any real use of talent. He contends that Andersen, like his hero character in Only A Fiddler, is pampered and nurtured instead of schooled by adversity, a fate Kierkegaard saw as his own. (HCA Center)
Andersen’s friendship with Charles Dickens began as one of mutual respect and admiration and his influence can clearly be seen in Andersen’s works. After meeting Dickens in 1847, he developed a repertoire with the writer that earned him a visit to Dickens home ten years later. Andersen well overstayed his welcome, however, much to the chagrin of Dickens and his family, and later cut ties with the Danish writer he found insufferable (Bredsdorff 125). In a letter to Richard Bentley, his London publisher, he likened his style to Dickens, “the difficulty of reproducing my style, which is said strangely to resemble Dicken’s without my having wished to copy it, for it is indeed my nature..” Having many works already published and translated into Danish, Dickens was a well-established writer by the time he and Andersen met, and Andersen loved and admired Dickens long before he met him—expressing the falling out of their friendship in later years as a real disappointment. (Bredsdorff 126) Nowhere is Dicken’s influence on Anderson more clear than in his story, “The Little Match Girl,” in which a little beggar girl freezes to death as she looks through the window at the lavishly decorated Christmas tree and roast goose of a wealthy family. Knowing Andersen’s and Dicken’s background, it’s no wonder that suffering is a major quality of Andersen’s heroes and heroines.
Andersen responded to much of the negative criticism that he received through some literary work. The Fir Tree reflects Andersen’s own struggle with winning the appraisal of critics:
"Who is Humpy-Dumpy?" asked the Mice. So then the Fir Tree told the whole fairy tale, for he could remember every single word of it; and the little Mice jumped for joy up to the very top of the Tree. Next night two more Mice came, and on Sunday two Rats even; but they said the stories were not interesting, which vexed the little Mice; and they, too, now began to think them not so very amusing either.
"Do you know only one story?" asked the Rats.
"Only that one," answered the Tree. "I heard it on my happiest evening; but I did not then know how happy I was."
"It is a very stupid story! Don't you know one about bacon and tallow candles? Can't you tell any larder stories?"
"No," said the Tree.
"Then good-bye," said the Rats; and they went home.
At last the little Mice stayed away also; and the Tree sighed: "After all, it was very pleasant when the sleek little Mice sat round me, and listened to what I told them. Now that too is over. But I will take good care to enjoy myself when I am brought out again." (HCA Center)
The mice represent the public, the rats the critics, and the lonely fir tree whose stories never quite measure up, Andersen himself. The interest of the mice wanes over time, and the story fails to meet the expectations and so the fir tree is left to reminisce about the days he had won the appraise of all. Other stories that parallel this include: A Good Humour, Something, Soup on a Sausage Peg, The Nightingale, and Ole the Tower Keeper. It was not just amongst Danes that he received criticisms, his tall and lanky apperance and uncomfortable, shy demeanor left him at the the mercy of many an unforgiving critic. A Swedish writer likened him to a crane; another writer called him the “tree-high Dane.” Yet another contemporary said, “His nose was like a mighty cannon, his eyes like two small green peas.” (Garfield, 7)
Hans Christian Andersen lived to see his tales translated into dozens of languages, and often he knew that the results were deplorable. Some translators "improved" Andersen's prose, and other didn't know Danish well enough to translate it correctly. Long before Disney, a sad ending was made happy; a moral might be added, and conservative Victorian sensibilities demanded a bit of censorship.
Hans Christian Andersen By means of his fairy tales achieved fame, honor, and riches during his lifetime; and the pressure, criticism and demand that accompanied his celebrity. His enduring classics reflect a need to soothe his troubled soul and endured to give later generations the templates to grasp their own suffering. He had many faults that plagued him throughout his life, especially his hypersensitivity to real or imagined offense, and was ill at ease with the reviews that many gave his work. Seen as child-like to many contemporaries and modern biographers, Andersen achieved his success in his widely received collection of fairy tales. His creations brought him the attention, appreciation, and adulation he craved throughout much of his adult life.
Works Cited:
Bredsdorff, Elias. Hans Andersen and Charles Dickens; a friendship and its dissolution. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1956
Jensen, Lars Bo. Criticisms of Hans Christian Andersen. 2003. 2 May 2008
< http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/forskning/anmeldelser/kritik_e.html>
Garfield, Patricia. “The Dreams of Hans Christian Andersen.” PatriciaGarfield.com. 2 May 2008.
Wullschlager, Jackie. Hans Christian Andersen. London: Viking/Penguin Books, 2005
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