He publishes his first book, A Walking Tour from the Holmen Canal to the Eastern Point of Amager. His first play, Love at St. Nicholas Tower, is performed at the Royal Theater.

1831 He makes his first major trip to Germany and meets many important authors and writers, including Ludwig Tieck, a German writer of fairy tales.
1832 Andersen writes The Book of My Life, the first of three autobiographies he will produce; it will not be published until 1926. The second part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust is published posthumously.
1833 Andersen’s mother, overcome by alcoholism, dies. During this year and the next, Andersen travels to Germany, Paris, Switzerland, and Italy. Slavery is abolished in the British Empire.
1835 The Improvisatore, an autobiographical novel set in Italy, is so successful that it is immediately published in German . Andersen’s first booklet of fairy tales, Fairy Tales Told for Children, is published in May; the volume includes “The Tinderbox,” “Little Claus and Big Claus,” and “The Princess on the Pea.” In December he publishes a second booklet of Fairy Tales that includes “Thumbelina” and “The Naughty Boy.” American novelist
1836 Andersen’s second autobiographical novel, O. T.: Life in Denmark, is published. Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers begins to be published in monthly installments.
1837 A third booklet of Andersen’s Fairy Tales is published, this one containing “The Little Mermaid” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” A third autobiographical novel, Only a Fiddler, is published.
1838 The King of Denmark awards Andersen an annual grant that allows him to concentrate on writing. He publishes the first booklet of a new collection of Fairy Tales Told for Children that includes “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” and “The Wild Swans.” Dickens’s Oliver Twist is a best-seller in England. Naturalist and artist John James Audubon completes publication of the four volumes of The Birds of America.
1839 The second booklet of the new Fairy Tales collection, including “The Flying Trunk” and “The Storks,” is published .
1840 Andersen’s plays The Mulatto, which dramatizes the evils of slavery, and The Moorish Maiden debut at the Royal Theater. During this year and the next, he travels to Italy, Greece, and Turkey.
1842 Andersen publishes the third booklet of the new collection of Fairy Tales; it includes “The Rose Elf” and “The Swineherd.” He publishes the travel book A Poet’s Bazaar.
1843 Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol. German poet Friedrich Hölderlin dies. English critic John Ruskin publishes the first volume of his critical work Modern Painters. The Tivoli Gardens open in Copenhagen.
1844 New Fairy Tales, a collection of tales containing “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Nightingale,” is published. Andersen makes his first visit to Weimar, Germany, a cultured city to which he will return repeatedly in the years that follow.
1845 He publishes a second collection of New Fairy Tales, which includes “The Snow Queen” and “The Spruce Tree,” and a third collection, which includes “The Red Shoes” and “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep.”
1847 He produces a third volume of New Fairy Tales; it includes “The Shadow.” Andersen’s second autobiography , The True Story of My Life, is published in German and is shortly translated into English. Andersen visits England and meets Dickens.
1848 He publishes a fourth volume of New Fairy Tales, which includes “The Little Match Girl,” and a patriotic novel, The Two Baronesses. Frederick VII becomes the Danish king. Denmark goes to war with Germany and Prussia over control of the region Schleswig-Holstein. German political theorist and revolutionary Karl Marx produces his Communist Manifesto.
1851 In Sweden, a travel narrative of Andersen’s visit to that country, is published. German-French poet Heinrich Heine publishes Romanzero. American writer Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick.
1852 Andersen publishes Stories, which includes “It’s Perfectly True!” Dickens begins monthly serialization of Bleak House. German playwright Christian Friedrich Hebbel’s Agnes Bernauer debuts.
1853 Andersen publishes a second collection of Stories that includes “Everything in Its Proper Place.”
1855 The Fairy Tale of My Life, Andersen’s third and final autobiography , is published. Kierkegaard dies. American poet Walt Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass.
1857 Andersen publishes the novel To Be or Not to Be.
1858 Andersen publishes the first two volumes of the series New Fairy Tales and Stories; included are ” ‘Something’” and “The Bog King’s Daughter.”
1859 A third volume of New Fairy Tales and Stories, including “The Girl Who Stepped on Bread,” is published.
1860 English playwright J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, is born.
1861 Andersen publishes the first volume in a second series of New Fairy Tales and Stories; included are “The Snow-man” and “What Father Does Is Always Right.”
1862 He publishes a second volume in the second series of New Fairy Tales and Stories; included are “The Ice Maiden” and “The Butterfly.”
1863 Andersen publishes the travel book In Spain.
1864 Denmark goes to war with Prussia and Austria over Schleswig-Holstein, which Denmark is forced to relinquish . French scientist Louis Pasteur demonstrates that treatment with heat protects certain foods from damaging microorganisms.
1865 Andersen publishes a third volume in the second series of New Fairy Tales and Stories, including “The Will-o’-the Wisps Are in Town.” Russian writer Leo Tolstoy begins publishing War and Peace. English author Lewis Carroll publishes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. English author Rudyard Kipling is born.
1866 Andersen publishes a fourth volume in the second series of New Fairy Tales and Stories, including “The Snowdrop.”
1870 Lucky Peter, Andersen’s last novel, appears.
1872 Andersen publishes two volumes in the third series of New Fairy Tales and Stories, including “The Gardener and the Gentry,” “Auntie Toothache,” and “The Story Old Johanna Told”; he begins to experience the first symptoms of liver cancer.
1875 Hans Christian Andersen dies on August 4 in Copenhagen. His funeral is attended by hundreds of admirers, including the Danish king.

The Hans Christian Andersen We Never Knew

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Long before publishers knew how to market their authors with dexterity, long before Walt Disney made his name into an international logo, Hans Christian Andersen knew how to create himself as a celebrity and glorify his name, despite the fact that he was a writer with limited talents. As a young country boy—perhaps, one could even say, a country bumpkin—who was poor as a church mouse, Andersen tried to take Copenhagen by storm in 1819, when he was only fourteen years old, and very few people would have wagered at that time that he would become the most famous fairy-tale writer of the nineteenth century, even more famous than the Brothers Grimm. But his fame was also tainted. Andersen was a nuisance, a pest, a demanding intruder, and a clumsy actor, whose greatest desire was to write plays and star in them. He never fully realized this ambition, but he did become an inventive and innovative writer of fairy tales, and he used his tales therapeutically to come to terms with the traumas and tensions in his life. All this led to the formation of an extraordinary personality, for Andersen was one of the greatest mythomaniacs, hypochondriacs, and narcissists of the nineteenth century. He custom-made his life into a fairy tale that he sold successfully from the moment he arrived in Copenhagen, and it is impossible to grasp him or any of his tales without knowing something about the reality of his life and his strategies for survival.

But how is it possible to know the reality of Andersen’s life when he consciously concealed many vital facts and incidents in the three autobiographies he wrote? How is it possible to relate his unusual, autobiographical tales to his life when they are so fantastic and can be interpreted in many different ways and on many levels? Andersen appears to defy definition and categorization, and it may not even be necessary to know something about his life to appreciate his tales. Yet because he wove himself so imaginatively into his narratives and because there are so many misunderstandings about his life and the meanings of his tales, it is crucial to attempt to sort through the myths about him and investigate how his tales came into existence so that we can have a fuller and clearer appreciation of the difficulties he overcame to achieve the success he did.