The Fairytale Life of Hans Christian Andersen

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When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

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In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

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This boy spent much more time making things and playing with puppets than he did socializing with other children.

Now, he'd just just finished a drawing.

He put down his pencils and smiled.

Looking somewhat like a camel and extremely odd and ugly as well.

He did have a big nose.

We know he had really big feet and really big hands.

He

looked different from a lot of the other kids, being taller than most.

His parents were too poor to buy him new clothes, so his long thin limbs stuck out awkwardly from his jacket sleeves and trouser cuffs.

This unusual-looking boy was called Hans Christian Andersen.

Though he was from a Christian family, the school was Jewish.

His mother had sent him there on account of its enlightened ideas about children.

Anderson had drawn a castle, a place he claimed to see in a recurring dream.

He had, no doubt, an extremely lively imagination.

He grew up alone.

His parents certainly did not have any time to take care of him or play with him, but he was very good at imagining up things.

Anderson showed his picture to Sarah, a girl slightly older than him.

She wanted to be a dairy maid in a manor house when she grew up.

His drawing was remarkable in its detail.

In a loud voice, Anderson announced that he was a changeling, a supernatural creature switched with a human child as a baby.

Though he'd grown up poor, he was really the scion of a noble family.

When he grew up, he'd be rich and build the castle in the picture Sarah could see in her hands.

Then he'd take her on as a dairymaid.

But Sarah just laughed at him.

A really big disappointment when she, instead of being eager to join him in the castle, turned on him and told some of the other pupils at school that Hans Christian had these crazy ideas and that that he was probably going mad.

Anderson felt a pang of pain and fear.

Once again, he was being made fun of.

Even as a child, he knew he had to escape the world around him.

He never fit in.

Years later, Anderson would turn the pain he felt at Sara's laugh into one of the world's most beloved stories that would inspire generations of children and adults.

A story about human suffering with an unlikely hero at its heart.

For BBC Radio 4, this is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

I'm Alex von Tunselmann.

I'm a historian, and today I'm going to tell you a story about a storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen.

He's a household name, but you may not know how much he overcame to become that.

August 1819.

Sitting below a bunch bunch of St.

John's wart to ward off evil, 14-year-old Hans Christian Andersen stared intensely at the fortune-teller who was examining the contents of the cup in front of her.

It might have been coffee, it might have been tea.

Anderson's mother was a washerwoman.

She could not read and was deeply superstitious.

Often she talked of trolls and ghosts.

Anderson developed a fear of the dark and of churchyards.

She hired the fortune-teller.

Denmark was a magical place.

This was a time where the superstition and supernatural ideas were really prevailing alongside Christianity, of course.

This for sure influenced him a lot, made his imagination stir.

Eina Grumsvensson is an associate professor at the Hans Christian Andersen Center at the University of Southern Denmark.

Anderson waited to hear what the fortune teller would say.

And she saw in it that one day Olense would be illuminated for the sake of Hans Christian

and that he would receive more recognition than he deserved.

This was thrilling.

The world had not so far been kind to Hans Christian Andersen.

Since Denmark joined the Napoleonic Wars, troops had been stationed in Odense.

They wore bright brocaded uniforms that captured Andersen's imagination.

Life was not so colourful for the poor.

Anderson's father had been a shoemaker and beloved to him.

He read aloud to him the entrancing stories of the Arabian Nights.

But when Anderson was 11, his father died.

His mother remarried, but the family still lived in a one-room apartment.

Outside, cows wandered down the filthy street.

And it was just near the asylum and near the local prison.

During the snowy winter months, it's said Anderson had to walk for half a day with his mother to visit wealthier relatives who might give them bread.

Sometimes though, there was a glimpse of a different life.

His mother worked at a denser castle.

He actually got to play with the small prince that was at the castle at that time.

Seeing those fine rooms, Anderson's head filled with dreams of what it would be like to live there.

He hoped that the Crown Prince might help him seek an education.

But Anderson was disappointed here because the Crown Prince advised him to become a craftsman and earn his money that way.

Anderson was hurt.

It wasn't so easy to work your way out of poverty, especially not when your family had a complicated reputation.

His aunt ran a brothel.

His grandmother was briefly imprisoned for having children out of wedlock.

His grandfather was mentally unwell and roamed the streets shouting.

And he was very concerned that he would be associated with this crazy grandfather.

But he dreamt of a very different life.

Already then, Anderson had this thought that he was going to be a poet and an artist.

His mother encouraged his artistic ambitions.

Even though his parents were extremely poor, they would actually go and see a performance at this small Ulenseator where there was a troop from the Royal Theatre at Copenhagen visiting.

Anderson had no money for tickets, but he assisted the theatre's distributor in exchange for permission to sit in the corner and watch the shows.

It made a great impression on Anderson, this urge to leave, to travel, to go to other places.

In the meantime, though, he had to earn his keep.

He had a good soprano voice and sang in the houses of the wealthy, but did not fit in with high society.

So he tried to learn a trade.

He went to a clothes factory, but was bullied a lot by colleagues there.

And

then he tried a tobacco factory, but with the same result.

You can really tell that he wanted to escape his life in Olense

because he left that early on, only 14 years old, still a kid really.

The fortune teller's words strengthened his resolve to leave.

He wanted to go to the capital, Copenhagen.

With just a handful of coins in his pocket, he set out on the two-day journey in a mail coach.

He was really, really afraid while sailing this part of the journey.

He had to kneel beside a house, a small fisher house in Kunsur and thank God that he survived the sail travel.

As the sun rose on the 6th of September 1819, Anderson saw the spires of Copenhagen for the first time.

But his first impression of the capital was far from beautiful.

On the city's outskirts, riots were in progress, a pogrom targeting the Jewish population.

And there was a lot of fighting and stores being destroyed and it was quite a terrible thing.

But since Anderson had never seen anything outside Ulnse before, he thought that this was really normal life in a capital and a big city.

So he didn't think it was anything other than normal when he arrived.

He may have thought this part of city life, but the horror of what he saw of the pogrom stayed with Anderson.

Later, in his novel Only a Fiddler, he wrote about a Jewish girl who was put in danger.

Inspired by his work with the theatre, Anderson hoped to make a living as an actor.

The first place that he sought out was the Royal Theatre.

He started by having minor roles in different plays and had a few dancing roles in ballets as well, but none of them really successful.

He did go around to different persons in Copenhagen, for example Madame Schell, and performed a small dance for her, and she thought he was completely crazy and threw him out.

Anderson found the address of the director of the Royal Choir School, an Italian tenor called Giuseppe Siboni.

He went to the house where a dinner party was in progress and sang for the guests.

Siboni was astonished.

He called Anderson the Little Nightingale of Odenza.

He must have had an exceptionally charming and convincing thing about him.

He did not let himself get defeated by the experiences of failure that he had.

Finally, he had the luck to be a part of the attached singing school at the theater led by Mr.

Saboni and he was trained there until he had the bad luck that his voice broke and he was no longer able to sing as beautiful as he was before.

Siboni lost interest in his nightingale.

He suggested Anderson return home and learn a trade.

Anderson was heartbroken.

He even considered ending his own life.

That was the point in his life where he could barely get any food to eat and was living really on the edge.

But he had made some connections at the Royal Theatre.

And that's when he really started writing instead and writing plays for the theater because his idea was that if he could not perform at the theater, he could write for the theater instead.

His first play was rejected by the board of the Royal Theatre.

But a director, Jonas Collin, saw something in his work.

It's also a quality that probably he did not take no for an answer, but also he must have had some talent that shined through that made people think that this is actually worthwhile giving this poor fellow a dime to live on.

Jonas Collin.

Soon he became Anderson's second father, you could say, and Anderson was included in the family of Jonas Colleen.

Colleen found a place for Anderson, now 17 years old, at the grammar school at Srejelsa.

There, he was to hone his writing skills under the instruction of a tyrannical schoolmaster, Simon Meisling.

He was very ill-tempered and also somewhat alcoholic and did not have a lot of patience with Anderson.

And Anderson was some years older than the rest of the pupils at the school and, in that sense, also a bit of an outsider.

Meisling thought his new pupil showed a worrying lack of interest in masculine behavior.

Anderson was sometimes described as having an oddly sexless nature.

He struggled.

The time where he was really depressed and feeling sometimes even suicidal.

Meisling tried to toughen him up, banning him from writing poetry, though he carried on in secret.

Later, at Elsinore School, Meisling forced his class to witness the execution of three local criminals.

He thought it would be good for their morals to do so.

And for Anderson, at least, this was a horrific experience that haunted him many years later.

Anderson considered his school days the worst time of his life.

At last, Colleen let him return to Copenhagen to complete his studies under private tuition.

Anderson was overjoyed.

Hi, I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

When something important is happening in the Bay Area, I want to know what it actually means for the people who live here.

In every episode of The Bay, we ask deeper questions, cut through the noise, and keep you connected to the community that you and I love.

Find new episodes of KQED's The Bay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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14 years later, summer 1842, south of Zeeland, Denmark.

Hans Christian Andersen, now 37 years old, stood on the parkland surrounding the castle of Gieselfeld.

The place was breathtaking, a former monastery surrounded by a moat.

A close friend once claimed Andersen wrote too much, but his poems and travel writing were now successful.

He had started traveling around the the Danish manor houses, the manor house of Kiesselfeld and the manor house of Breinbel,

both in the south of Sealand.

The castle was owned by the Countess of Daneskil, the mother of the Duchess of Augustenborg, no less.

It could be overwhelming to be around such wealth and class, but these patrons helped keep Anderson's creative endeavours flowing.

And this was a sweet deal for both the nobility at the manor houses and for Anderson himself.

Very convenient places for him to write because he didn't have to think about making dinner or whatever.

They got someone to entertain them and read aloud to them and make papercots with the kids.

Anderson had just received bad news about his latest play.

He had gotten news from Copenhagen saying that the people at the theater

had

booed at the theatre play.

And that made Anderson feel

extremely bad and annoyed and aggravated, resulting in him going for a walk around the castle and in the park and the surroundings.

How could people not understand his work?

He wrote from the heart, didn't he?

Swiftly, Anderson crossed the woods and fields.

Surrounded by nature, he began to calm down.

The outdoors always brought a smile back to his face.

A few years earlier, he'd had romantic feelings for his closest friend, Yonas Kolleen's son, Edvard.

He wrote to him then, If you looked down to the bottom of my soul, you would understand fully the source of my longing and pity me.

He'd also started to write fairy tales.

Still, though, as he walked around a lake, he felt there were things he'd not been able to express.

And there among the flowers and the fields, he had the idea of the story of a duck.

A duck wasn't exactly a traditional protagonist, but perhaps its story would allow him to say something that really mattered.

He moved to another patron's home, this time at the nearby manor house of Breantvid.

The 17th century French-style building was surrounded by lime trees, white lotus flowers and swans.

And a few days later, when he was on another walk in the surroundings of the manor house, he saw some signets

and his idea further developed.

Three weeks later, back at Gieselfeld, Hans Christian Andersen sat down to work on his news story.

Ugh, just look at that duckling.

He's quite intolerable.

And immediately one of the ducks flew over to him and bit it in the neck.

Leave him alone, the mother said.

He's doing nobody any harm.

Yes, but he's too big and too bizarre, the duck who had bitten him said.

So he's going to be given what for?

Very much a parallel, of course, to some of the feeling he had as a child and also in his younger years as well, in the beginning of his time in Copenhagen as well, where he was very much sort of outside society.

When he returned to Copenhagen, he went for a walk by the canal and around the port port of Neuhaum.

He had the opening for his fairy tale, but to think back over his own life in such detail had been incredibly painful.

It took all his courage to put those words, those feelings, down on a page where anyone might read them.

January 1843.

Anderson sat at his desk in his room just a few steps away from the Royal Theatre.

He was still working on his story.

He spent hours scribbling in his signature gothic handwriting.

One has the image of him sitting with his pen in his hand, really most of his life.

Writing at a desk with a pen and ink, of course.

He'd come a long way from his childhood in Odense.

Listen, my friend, they said, you're so ugly, I rather like you.

How about joining us and becoming a migrating bird?

Close by in another marsh there are some truly delightful wild geese, young ladies, all of them, that can say quack.

Fortune could smile well on you, you being as ugly as you are.

Though Anderson had never had much romantic success, he had many good friends and a successful writing career.

Now he found that the duckling's story flowed believably onto the page.

Just like this creature, he'd endured physical hardship, cruelty, and failure.

And so the duckling was given a three-week trial period, but no eggs came.

And the cat was the master in the house, and the hen was misses, and they always said, we and the world, for they thought they were half of it, and the better half at that.

The duckling felt it must be possible to have a different opinion, but the hen would have none of it.

Can you lay eggs?

she asked.

No.

Well, keep your mouth shut then.

And the cat said, Can you arch your back, purr, and shoot out sparks?

No.

Then keep your opinions to yourself when sensible folk are talking.

And the duckling sat in the corner and sulked.

Then it happened to think of the fresh air and the sunshine.

It had such a strange urge to float on the water.

Finally, it couldn't help it and had to tell the hen about it.

1843.

Hans Christian Andersen was preparing to spend Christmas time in Zealand.

He did not do what was the normal thing to do, to get married and have children.

At the time was considered extremely odd and almost a bit suspicious.

And that is something that makes him really cool, that he had the courage to not care that much what society thought about his lifestyle as a single artist devoting himself to art and not raising a family.

Just weeks before, the story he'd finally decided to call The Ugly Duckling had been published, along with three others he'd written, in a book called New Fairy Tales, First Volume, First Collection.

The first printing had quickly sold.

Today, Eino Grum Schwenson leads a project on the preserved manuscripts of Anderson's canonical fairy tales.

We are in the lucky position that a lot has been preserved from really many of his fairy tales, and many stages of drafts and fare copies and so forth makes it possible for us to research what is happening with the text in his creative process.

Normally many of the manuscripts we are handling are really difficult to read because he has been writing in haste and often being very economic with the paper and gluing bits of paper upon bits of paper and unfortunately in the case of the ugly duckling though there are no manuscripts preserved.

So we don't know exactly how the text developed but we do know that in his diaries and letters he mentions the original title was the swan baby totally revealing the point of the story and as is often the case in Anderson's work really a good thing that he changed this title so that there's no spoiler alert.

Among all of the stories Anderson wrote, he found this one of the hardest.

Writing the ugly duckling was a process that took place in over a year.

It's set in the beautiful grounds of a Danish manor house, just like the place where Anderson had come up with the idea.

I'll fly over to them, the regal birds, and they will peck me to death because I, who am so ugly, dare approach them.

But it doesn't matter in the slightest.

Better to be killed by them than nipped by ducks, pecked up by the hens, kicked up by the girl who takes care of the henrun and suffer throughout the winter.

And it flew out into the water and swam towards the magnificent swans.

They saw it and glided towards it with rustling feathers.

Just kill me, the poor creature said, bowing its head down towards the surface of the water and waiting for death.

But what did it see in the clear water?

It saw its own reflection beneath itself, but it was no longer a clumsy, blackish-grey bird, horrible and ugly.

It was itself a swan.

It doesn't matter if one is born in a duckyard, if only one has lain in a swan's egg.

Unlike many other of Anderson's tale, it has this really sort of happy ending with the recognition of the worth of the swan.

But it is really striking how much it has to go through before it gets this recognition and I think that's probably

something that many people can identify with more or less.

It's also, of course, a classical story of development from child to young adult.

Finally, the fortune teller's prediction seemed to be coming true.

Like the ugly duckling, he'd grown into something wonderful.

In its time, the ugly duckling was unusual.

It was a completely original fairy tale, not based on an older story.

The transformation in the story isn't magical, but entirely natural.

Andersen himself had always been intrigued by the idea of changelings who eventually grew into their intended form, even believing he might be one himself.

He'd turned the cruel bullying he experienced in childhood into a universal story of survival.

Hans Christian Andersen became a treasured national figure in Denmark.

Many of his stories became part of the fabric of culture.

The Emperor's new clothes, the princess and the pea, the snow queen, the little mermaid.

Meanwhile, the story of the ugly duckling continues to resonate with children and adults around the world.

In 1914, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev wrote a version in song.

In 1940, a Disney adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject Cartoon.

There's even a musical version entitled Honk, which is often performed in schools.

You could say that he taught people that they were enough as they are and that they don't have to seek outer acceptance.

This story of success or story of rising from a poor background or rising from bullying and bad circumstances is somebody that everybody would like to mirror themselves in.

Being able to have empathy with others and sympathy for the weak and not only the strong.

That is a really lovely thing.

And not least in this complex and modern world that we live in.

Next time on History's Heroes, a 7th century monk sets out on a dangerous journey from China to India and becomes a folk hero.

Xuanzang levels up.

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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to Your Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

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