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The creator of “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Snow Queen,” “Thumbelina,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Tinderbox,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” and “Ole-Luk-Oie” was a master storyteller not only on the page but in his own life. His mysterious fate and unmistakable personality still fascinate people, making Andersen Denmark’s most famous figure even 200 years after his birth.
Marfan Syndrome
Some scholars see signs of an inherited form of disproportionate tallness in Andersen’s appearance that align with Marfan syndrome. That rare connective-tissue disorder, first described by French pediatrician Antoine Marfan, affects multiple organs and can be life-threatening; historically it has been suggested in figures such as U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and violinist Niccolò Paganini. The condition is estimated to occur in roughly 1 in 50,000 people.
The syndrome can produce very long, thin limbs and fingers, a look contemporaries compared to a “giant spider.” Observers commented on his size-47 shoes: “He didn’t have to worry about anyone borrowing his galoshes.” Witnesses described Andersen as a tall “stork,” about 6 feet 1 inch, with a prominent nose, small eyes, poor posture, unusually long limbs, and awkward movements.
One possible natural compensator for those physical traits is heightened adrenaline. People with arachnodactyly often live with constant tension and can become relentless workaholics with excitable nervous systems. Andersen rewrote his works repeatedly, showed a fiery temperament, and was known for his nervousness and sensitivity.
Christian Albrecht Jensen – H. C. Andersen (1836)
“Cockroaches” in His Head
His chronic nervous tension fed many phobias that shaped both his life and the melancholy plots of his tales. For example, the enormous, fierce dogs in “The Tinderbox” mirror Andersen’s fear of dogs. The tragic ending of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” reflects his terror of dying in a fire: he reportedly always carried a rope so he could escape a burning building through a window.
For years Andersen slept on a mattress without a bed, because beds reminded him of deathbeds. He feared being buried alive and arranged to have his veins opened and blood drained before his funeral (this was carried out). When he fell ill, he even left a note by his bedside reading, “I am alive,” to prevent being pronounced dead prematurely.
Once admirers sent him the world’s largest box of candy. Fearing it might be poisoned, he gave it to neighborhood children to try first. When the children survived, Andersen took the candies back and ate them himself.
He worried for long stretches that he had lost money or documents, overpaid for a ticket, or failed to seal or sign an envelope. He feared being laughed at, became lost in unfamiliar surroundings, and sometimes displayed tics and stuttering. He feared robbery, cholera, hired assassins, accidents, losing teeth, overdosing on medicine, temptation, poisoning, madness, and even the End of the World.
His sensitivity was extreme. From childhood Andersen felt like the “ugly duckling” he later wrote about autobiographically. He remembered feeling like a drowning dog, pelted with stones by cruel children. Those early psychological wounds may have contributed to his later distance from children; he rarely tried to charm them. He did, however, consider children when choosing music for his funeral: it had to match the rhythm of little steps, since children would likely come to say goodbye. Andersen insisted he primarily wrote for adults, and when approving a sketch for his lifetime monument he asked not to be surrounded by children: “In such company, I wouldn’t be able to write a single line.”
Skeletons in the Closet
Andersen never married and had no children. He seemed to want no part in continuing what he viewed as a shameful lineage: a great-grandfather with mental illness, a grandmother convicted three times for immoral behavior, an alcoholic mother, an aunt who ran a brothel, and a sister who worked as a prostitute—whom he referred to as “the daughter of the mother.” His sister Mary Karen died when Hans was 41.
He came from the poor quarters of the Danish island of Funen and was ashamed of his origin. Andersen preferred to present a more prosperous neighboring building than his actual home in Odense, a three-family dwelling where five family members lived in a single room of 452 square feet.
The house in Odense where Andersen was born
He was born on April 2, 1805, to washerwoman Anne Marie Andersdatter and 22-year-old hereditary shoemaker Hans Andersen, who was 12 years younger than his wife. At the time of their marriage the mother was seven months pregnant with the future writer, raising questions about official paternity.
Andersen himself fostered rumors of royal blood, hinting at a connection to the royal family. In his early biography he mentioned a childhood friend, Prince Fritz, who later became King Frederick VII, and gossip circulated that his parents had told him he was related to the king.
He spoke of his mother with tears. She had a brutal childhood, sometimes begging for alms under a bridge and sitting on the damp ground, drinking from puddles. If she returned home without enough, she would be beaten. From age eight she worked as a maid in a wealthy household; at 26 she gave birth to Andersen’s older sister by a local potter and later supported herself as a grocer, a road worker, and a washerwoman. After Hans was born when she was 34, Anne Marie continued to work as a cleaner.
To help support the family, his father volunteered for Napoleon’s army, but returned ill and died at 33, when Hans was only 11. The boy remembered his father fondly. Two years later his mother remarried, but she increasingly turned to alcohol. She died at 62 and was buried in a pauper’s grave a year or two before her 28-year-old son achieved fame.
“Becoming Famous”
Andersen wrote his first fairy tale as a child, but that early story only came to light in 2012, when researchers found his earliest manuscript: a 700-word tale called “The Greasy Candle.” The plot is strikingly dramatic for a teenager: a candle that doesn’t know its purpose until it meets a flint, which ignites it and allows it to burn and illuminate the darkness.
His imagination came alive in a homemade puppet theater. The boy wrote plays for the puppets, performed, acted, and watched. His invented stories failed to interest rough peers or preoccupied parents, so his passion for theater had a single audience in that “temple of art”: an old cat named Karl. Like his childhood puppet shows, his later writing often began with cutting out cardboard characters.
After trying to sew clothes for dolls, the boy decided to learn tailoring. He only mastered grammar around age 10, and financial hardship forced him to leave a Jewish school for poor children to earn money and move toward the arts. He apprenticed as a weaver, worked in a wool factory and a tobacco factory, but he was not meant to be a factory worker.
At 14, Hans left home for Copenhagen to “become famous.” He was aided by Sophia Charlotte Hermansen, the nurse of Prince Ferdinand and a friend of his mother. She gathered recommendations from influential people, covered his clothes and food, taught him German, hired dance and singing teachers, and helped arrange work and schooling.
A statue in Central Park, New York, dedicated to Andersen and his tale “The Ugly Duckling”
A Life Well-Lived
Andersen imagined himself on the grand stage. He loved both opera and ballet. Who else would be taken into the Royal Theatre of Copenhagen chorus “from the street”? Rumors swirled that the palace manager and the nurse of the heir raised the illegitimate son of a king who had bedded a washerwoman—an explanation people used to rationalize how high society opened doors to a rootless provincial with the look of a “sad stork.”
After he was dismissed from the theater when his voice changed, Andersen bombarded cultural institutions with plays. He even sent a play to the king, which led to funds for publication. The work was not a success, but Andersen received a scholarship for further study.
He entered Latin school years later than his peers: the 17-year-old sat in class with 12-year-olds. The school director took him in, and the sensitive young man struggled under the director’s strict morals. He completed his schooling at 23 and then attended the University of Copenhagen.
Although Andersen kept making spelling and grammatical mistakes throughout his life, that never stopped him from publishing prolifically. The Andersen Center attributes to him 4 autobiographies, 212 fairy tales, 1,024 poems, 8 epics, 28 sagas, 51 plays, 7 satires, 6 novels, 25 travelogues, 42 articles, 24 collections, and 37 brochures.
His autobiography, “The Fairy Tale of My Life,” surprised even his supporters. Some contemporaries found the book self-absorbed. “To publish intimate confessions through printed words is base and vain,” said his lifelong promoter Xavier Marmier. Andersen’s book devoted 200 pages to cataloging praise for himself.
People also found it odd that a man with an unconventional appearance loved photography (he hired more than a hundred photographers worldwide) and lingered before mirrors to inspect himself, fix his hair, and practice a “genius face.” Andersen admitted he wanted to seem larger than he was. Living in an image proved easier than enduring the trials of his finely organized soul.
Romantic Longings and Desire
Biographers have long debated Andersen’s private life, which is as intriguing as his creativity. Some argue that his visible courtships of women were a cover for true attraction to men. Others suggest he may have been bisexual. Early in life he suffered when his beloved Riborg Voigt became engaged to another man. Another romantic interest, the wife of a lawyer, could not reciprocate. The Swedish opera singer Jenny (Annie) Lind rebuffed his intimate advances and offered friendship instead; biographer Carol Rosen suggests Lind inspired the cold-hearted Snow Queen.
Researchers of his correspondence, Axel Dressler and Michael Rüts, say Andersen carried a long, unrequited love for Stockholm official Edward Collin. Andersen wrote passionate, elevated letters to Collin, confessing longing “like for a pretty Calabrian girl,” and warning that “the femininity of his nature and their friendship must remain a secret.” The unrequited love in “The Little Mermaid” draws on Andersen’s relationship with Collin, who later married a woman and broke Andersen’s heart.
On a visit to Charles Dickens in 1857, Andersen asked to be allowed to stay in the bathroom with Dickens’s young son; Dickens angrily refused and expelled him from the house.
Andersen’s life contained many whimsical—and sometimes unfulfilled—sexual longings, and those longings reportedly led him in part to drugs and pornography.
Biographer Jackie Wullschleger, who won a city award in Odense for her research, claims Andersen had physical relationships with men and names Danish dancer Harold Scharff as a likely lover. Scharff dined alone with Andersen and gave him a silver toothbrush for his 57th birthday, a sign of their closeness. Andersen marked March 1862 in his diary as “an erotic period that ended his loneliness,” but on November 13, 1863, he wrote that Scharff had not visited for eight days and that “it was all over with him.”
The intimate parts of Andersen’s diaries were published in the 1960s and include frank entries, some marked with a “+” indicating successful masturbation. Andersen claimed to remain a virgin despite visits to brothels; he said he didn’t seek physical pleasure so much as long conversations with prostitutes.
At 70, Andersen died of liver cancer at the country estate of banker Moritz Melchior near Copenhagen. No widow or heirs stood at his funeral.
A statue in Odense, half-submerged in water.
