According to his autobiography, he was born on a bed made from a coffin that had once displayed the body of a distinguished count. He wrote, "Instead of a noble corpse . . . here lay, on the second of April, 1805, a living and weeping child—that was myself, Hans Christian Andersen."
Although his readers might have doubted the story of his first bed, there is no question that Hans Christian Andersen came from a humble home. But, though born poor, Hans Christian Andersen’s journey through life was a rich one. His fanciful imagination and his many experiences and adventures contributed greatly to his unique perception of the world. Andersen’s way with words, coupled with his sensitive personality, molded him into one of the world’s most loved writers of all time.
Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, where his father worked as a shoemaker and his mother washed other people’s clothes. Andersen’s father, though not formally educated, was literate and owned many books. He read plays and Arabian folk tales to his young son, which instilled in the boy a lifelong love of storytelling and a respect for the power of the human imagination. At the time, Odense was the only city outside the capital, Copenhagen, that had a theater, and Andersen’s father took him now and then to see plays and operas. "The theater soon became my favorite place," Andersen wrote in his autobiography. But because of his poverty, the young boy could not attend performances as often as he wanted. So he became friends with the man who handed out the playbills for each show, and the man would give Andersen one every day. The young boy would then sit on a street corner outside the theater, reading the playbill and imagining the entire play in his head.
But Andersen’s vivid imagination and sensitivity set him apart from the other children his age. He was different from the boisterous boys who spent their time playing and fighting in the streets. Andersen wrote, "I very seldom played with other boys; even at school I took little interest in their games. At home I had playthings enough . . . My greatest delight was in making clothes for my dolls." Andersen spent his time indoors reading stories and putting on plays for his dolls, who became his audience.
Hans Christian Andersen’s father died when he was 11, so the young boy had to work at a textile factory to help his family. There, Andersen was constantly teased for being different. Other workers laughed at him and called him names. One day at work, some men grabbed Andersen and tried to pull down his pants to embarrass him in front of the others. Andersen managed to escape, but he felt so humiliated and hurt that he never went back. It wasn’t long before Andersen concocted a better way to make money for his family. From the time he was very young, everyone had always loved his high soprano singing voice. When he would sing in his backyard garden, people would stop in the street and listen. Soon, the affluent people of Odense heard of this boy with the beautiful voice. They asked Andersen’s mother to bring him to their homes to sing for them, and they paid him too. After a while, Hans Christian Andersen’s mother saw that her son had enough money to become apprenticed to a tailor. But he didn’t want to be a tailor; instead, he wanted to go to Copenhagen, the cultural center of Denmark.
So, at the age of fourteen, the resolute boy arrived alone in Copenhagen determined to become the most famous performer in the city. It wasn’t long before Andersen was singing for a party of wealthy guests, including Giuseppe Siboni, a famous tenor and the new director of the Royal Opera. After hearing Andersen, Siboni promised to help him develop his singing voice, and he took the young man into his home. Unfortunately, Siboni’s support ended when Andersen’s voice broke during a music lesson—his voice was starting to change—and his teacher advised him to learn a trade.
Undaunted, Hans Christian Andersen did not abandon his desire to be a performer. He continued to write short plays and look for work until, by coincidence, his efforts were noticed by one of the directors of the Royal Danish Theater, an influential man named Jonas Collin. Collin, a philanthropist, recognized Andersen as an exceptional talent and decided to support the young man in his goal of becoming a writer. However, Andersen had little education, so Collin arranged for him to attend grammar school.
By this time, Hans Christian Andersen was 17 years old and his fellow students were only 11 years old. Again, Andersen became the center of unwanted attention. Like the ugly duckling from his famous story of the same name, Andersen was oversized, clumsy, unappreciated, and out of place in this school. To remedy the situation, Collin arranged for private tutoring, and Andersen eventually graduated from Copenhagen University.
Interestingly, even though he was burgeoning into a fine writer, Hans Christian Andersen had difficulty with spelling. Many people believe he had what is known today as dyslexia, a learning disorder that makes it difficult for a person to recognize some written words. Throughout his life, Andersen had to rely on others to check his stories for spelling errors, and he never mastered the more complicated writing style of the time. As a result, he developed his own style—more like the way ordinary people spoke—which was authentic and fresh. Later in life, despite his learning challenges, Andersen became fluent in English, Dutch, and German.
During his university years, Andersen was publishing poetry as well as short stories. He received recognition and praise for his work, but it was not until 1835, when he published his first novel entitled The Improvisatore, or The Improviser, that he became a success. Hans Christian Andersen had grappled with adversity for a long time and suffered a lot of disappointment, but with this achievement, he hoped his years of anguish were finally coming to an end.
Over time, Andersen became almost inseparable from his patron Collin and his family. They were from the very top of the upper class of Denmark, and the new writer began attending parties and socializing with the rich and powerful. He had gone from one extreme to another—from the poorest class to the most aristocratic level of society—but it was not a smooth transition. Andersen continued to feel awkward and never fully accepted by the upper class. He wrote of his emotions and struggles in another of his most famous stories, "The Little Mermaid." In this story, the main character leaves her underwater home and family to become part of a human world that is completely different, and she doesn’t fit in.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote in many forms—plays, novels, short stories, and travel essays—but his popularity exploded when he began writing fairy tales. Drawing on the stories and experiences from his childhood, Hans Christian Andersen identified with the unfortunate, the misunderstood, and the overlooked. His main characters were often ugly, and this attribute usually hid an inner beauty and strength that was later revealed after misfortune and struggle. Most importantly, his stories possessed the transcendent quality of appealing to children while conveying a moral lesson that even adults could appreciate. With the translation of his stories into many languages, Andersen became one of the most famous writers in the world, and later his life would be made into a hit film that was nominated for six Academy Awards in 1953.
Hans Christian Andersen died on August 4, 1875, at age seventy after a long illness. But his fairy tales, with their unforgettable characters, live on. "Thumbelina," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Snow Queen," "The Little Match Girl"—these stories and many more have allowed readers to see some of Andersen’s own joy and suffering revealed in every tale.