Get the latest tech news
150 years of Hans Christian Andersen
His oddball stories were driven by his outsider status and strange appearance.
David Copperfield’s first sighting of Heep was “a cadaverous face” peering out of the round tower: “He had a way of writhing when he wanted to express enthusiasm, which was very ugly, the snaky twistings of his throat and body.” “If you’re an eel, sir,” counsels Betsey Trotwood, “conduct yourself like one. If The Red Shoes and The Emperor’s New Clothes enter us like arrows, it is because they came to him in the same way: “It often seems to me,” Anderson reflected, “as if every hoarding, every little flower is saying to me: ‘Look at me, just for a moment, and then my story will go right into you.’” It is part of his genius that his fables, micro-concentrations of imaginative strength, feel like oral legends that have been passed down for millennia in the collective unconscious. His first stories, including The Tinder Box, The Little Mermaid and The Emperor’s New Clothes, appeared in a series of three pamphlets published between 1835 and 1837, after which he became, as Gosse put it, “one of the most famous men at that time alive in Europe”.
Or read this on Hacker News
