Andersen, HANS CHRISTIAN, one of the great story-tellers of the world, the most widely popular of Danish authors, was born April 2, 1805, at Odense in Fünen. The son of a poor shoemaker, after his father's death he worked for some time in a factory, but his wonderful singing and extraordinary talent soon procured him friends and patrons, of whom the earliest was Madame Bunkeflod, widow of a poet of some reputation. He early displayed a talent for poetry, and was known in his native place as 'the comedy-writer.' Hoping to obtain an engagement in the theatre, he found his way to Copenhagen, but was rejected for his lack of education. He next tried to become a singer, but soon found that his physical qualities were quite unfitted for the stage. Generous friends, however, helped him in his distress; and application having been made by one of them to the king, he was placed at an advanced school at the public expense, and so enabled to get the better of the defects of his education. Some of his poems, particularly the one entitled The Dying Child, had already been favourably received, and he now became better known by the publication of his Walk to Amak, a literary satire in the form of a humorous narrative. In 1830 he published the first collected volume of his Poems, and in 1831 a second, under the title of Fantasies and Sketches. Spite of his genius and industry he failed to please the critics, and his genial egotism made him an easy butt for their clumsy ridicule. A travelling pension granted him by the king in 1833 removed him from his miseries, and supplied what was needful for his mental development. Some of its fruits were his Travelling Sketches of a tour in the north of Germany; Agnes and the Merman, completed in Switzerland; and The Improvisatore, a series of scenes depicted in a glowing style, and full of poetic interest, inspired by the genial atmosphere of Rome and Naples. The public opinion, not of Denmark alone, but of Europe, asserted itself about the merits of the last of these books, and henceforth its author was safe from the critics. Soon afterwards, he produced O.T. (1836), a novel containing vivid pictures of northern scenery and manners, which was followed (1837) by another, entitled Only a Fiddler. In 1840 he produced a romantic drama entitled The Mulatto, which was well received; but another drama, Raphaella, was less successful. In the same year appeared his Picture-book without Pictures, a series of the finest imaginative sketches. In the end of 1840 he commenced a somewhat lengthened tour in Italy and the East, of which he gave an account in A Poet's Bazaar (1842). In 1844 Andersen visited the court of Denmark by special invitation, and in the following year he received an annuity. After that date he travelled much, visiting England as well as other countries. Among other works of Andersen are The Story of My Life (1855); New Tales and Adventures (1858-61); Tales from Jutland (1859); The Sandhills of Jutland (1860); Tales for Children (1861); The Wild Swans, and The Ice Maiden (1863).
His fame has long been more than European. His Dying Child has been translated into the language of Greenland; and on his seventieth birthday he was presented with a book containing one of his tales in fifteen languages. On the same occasion the king of Denmark gave him the Grand Cross of the Dannebrog Order. He died at Copenhagen, August 6, 1875. In his autobiography, Andersen has told the story of his life with all his peculiar charm. Most of his tales, moreover, were suggested by the incidents of his own life. Even his most fantastic stories have usually a background of actual experience, and perhaps to this is due, in no small degree, their most abiding charm—the perfectly naive and inimitable sense of reality and truth, even in incidents quite out of the world of the ordinary and the natural. His heavy face and ungraceful form hid a heart that overflowed with love for all lovely things; he secured himself the surest immortality in the heart of the children of the civilised world.
See, besides the egotistic Story of my Life (trans. 1871), his Correspondence with the Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar (trans. 1891) and the Life by R. Nisbet Bain (1895).