Andersen

Andersen is son of Anders, the Danish Andrew, one of the small stock of patronymics Denmark froze in the nineteenth century, and one Odense household lifted it out of that stock. The parish book of Sankt Hans Kirke records a birth at two in the morning on 2 April 1805 to Hans Andersen, a journeyman shoemaker of 22, and Anne Marie Andersdatter, 34, illiterate and a washerwoman.

In 1807 the family took one room and a kitchen of about 42 square metres at Klingenberg 664, now Munkemøllestræde 3-5, in a house of twelve people, and by Andersen's own account his father built the marriage bed from a frame that had lately carried a Count Trampe's coffin. That father read him Holberg's comedies and the Arabian Nights. In 1812 he enlisted as a soldier in place of a conscripted farmer's son who paid for the substitution, came home after two years ill and broken to find the money lost in the state bankruptcy of 1813, and died in 1816. The boy was put briefly to a cloth factory and a tobacco works, then back to a school for the poor.

On 8 July 1819 the dean of Odense Cathedral confirmed him, which he did not usually do for poor folk's children, and noted that the boy had good abilities and good religious knowledge though his diligence was not praiseworthy. On 4 September, aged fourteen, Andersen took leave of his mother and went up by mail coach with thirteen rigsdaler and a letter from the Odense printer Iversen to Anna Margrethe Schall of the Royal Theatre. He reached Copenhagen on 6 September, in the middle of the Jødefejden, the anti-Jewish riots, and assumed this was what a large city was.

Madame Sophie Charlotte Hermansen, once wet-nurse to Prince Ferdinand, found him a bed and work with a master joiner, which lasted a day, then got him in front of Siboni of the Royal Theatre's singing school. Siboni, with the composer C.E.F. Weyse among others, raised a subscription for the fourteen-year-old and promised board and lessons. Then his soprano broke, and he went on to the Court Theatre's dancing school and into the chorus without fixed wages.

His first play, Røverne i Vissenberg, was refused in 1821, and his first book appeared in 1822 under the pseudonym Villiam Christian Walter, made out of Shakespeare, himself and Walter Scott. A second play was judged unfit for the stage, but the theatre's director Knud Lyne Rahbek thought it showed hidden gifts that the right education might draw out. On 13 September 1822 the board sent Jonas Collin to petition Frederik VI, and the king granted money from the fund ad usus publicos so that the boy should become a useful citizen.

Andersen reached the Latin school at Slagelse that October, where the headmaster Meisling set him in the second class among boys of eleven and twelve, and he and Collin forbade him verse of any kind. He lived in Meisling's own house from 1825 and followed him to Helsingør in 1826, and called those the darkest and most bitter years of his life. At Easter 1827 a young teacher went to Collin and convinced him the boy had to be taken out; he passed his university examination in September 1828.

In 1835, the year his Italian journey came back as the novel Improvisatoren, C.A. Reitzel began issuing something far slighter. The first instalment of Eventyr, fortalt for Børn, on 8 May 1835, ran to sixty-one unbound pages and held The Tinderbox, Little Claus and Big Claus, The Princess and the Pea and Little Ida's Flowers. Three were folktales heard in childhood; the fourth he made for Ida Thiele, daughter of the folklorist Just Mathias Thiele. Reitzel paid thirty rigsdalers for the manuscript.

Thumbelina came in the second booklet that December, and the third, on 7 April 1837, carried The Little Mermaid and The Emperor's New Clothes. On the eve of publication he rewrote the ending of the latter, so that a child calls out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

The Danish notices in 1836 were cool. Critics objected to the chatty, informal manner and to what struck them as immorality: a children's book was meant to educate, not amuse. What he had done was write in something close to spoken Danish and set the view at a child's height, and as Georg Brandes put it, he presents not the animal in the man but the man in the animal.

There are 156 tales across nine volumes, carried since into more than 125 languages. He wrote many of them on the Danish manor circuit: Holsteinborg near Skælskør above all, where his rooms are still kept untouched, and Basnæs, Gisselfeld, Glorup and Frijsenborg in Jutland. He paid nothing for board; he paid in performance, with readings, comedies, songs and papercuts for the children of the house. His own address from 1845 to 1864 was Nyhavn 67.

He met Charles Dickens in 1847, and in 1857 stretched a short call at Gads Hill Place into a five-week stay, after which the letters stopped. Early in 1872, at 67, he fell out of bed and never fully recovered. He died on 4 August 1875 at Rolighed, the country house of the banker Moritz G. Melchior, having told a composer beforehand how to set the funeral music: most of the people walking after him would be children, so the beat should keep time with little steps.

By then the government was paying him a stipend as a national treasure, and his will of 1860 had founded a bequest for the most diligent boy at an Odense school for the poor, paid on his birthday every year since 1877.

Hans Niels Andersen (1852-1937) was born into a working-class family in Nakskov, trained as a shipbuilder and signed on as a ship's carpenter in 1872. He came to Bangkok in 1873, rose to first mate and then master of the Thoon Kramom, a ship owned by Chulalongkorn, king of Siam. In 1884 he set up Andersen & Co. in Bangkok, running import and export, shipping, logging and sawmills at once.

Back in Copenhagen he opened a branch, and in 1897, with Isak Glückstadt of the Danish Farmers' Bank, founded the East Asiatic Company on an equity of 3.5 million kroner. Meant only to carry trade with the Far East, it grew into the largest company in Denmark, with 250 enterprises in more than fifty countries. In 1912 he had Burmeister & Wain build the MS Selandia, the first oceangoing motorship in the world, and in the year he died the turnover exceeded 233 million kroner.

With Denmark neutral in the First World War, the foreign minister Erik Scavenius sent him abroad to look for a way out of it; the peace-making came to nothing. He was Siam's consul general in Denmark from 1898 to 1932 and Knight of the Elephant, the highest Danish order, in 1919.

Vilhelm Andersen (1864-1953), born at Nordrup near Ringsted, became professor of Danish literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1908 and held the chair in Nordic literature from 1918 to 1930. He was among the first to call the Danish 1800s a Golden Age of Culture and gave Carl Nielsen the libretto for the opera Maskarade.

Carl Albert Andersen (1876-1951) was Norwegian champion in the pole vault and the high jump in 1896, 1897 and 1900, and took the pole vault bronze at the Paris Olympics of 1900 with 3.20 metres. Then he changed sport: gold with the Norwegian gymnastics team in the Swedish system event at Athens in 1906, and silver in the all-round team at London in 1908.

Catherine Ann Andersen (1870-1957), born Catherine McHaffie at Onehunga in Auckland, took the name by marrying Johannes Andersen in 1900 and spent half a century organising under it. From 1910 she sat on the committee that founded a free kindergarten in Christchurch, and was a Wellington delegate to the National Council of Women until she resigned in 1924 over a debate on maternal mortality. She helped found the Wellington Lyceum Club in 1923 and led it from 1926 to 1941, helped found the New Zealand Women Writers' and Artists' Society in 1932, and founded the New Zealand Women's Biographical Society in 1945.

And 2 April, the date in the Odense parish book, is now International Children's Book Day, marked by the Hans Christian Andersen Awards for children's literature.