[This is the third of three edited and updated excerpts from an essay entitled "Hans Christian Andersen and the Victorians," which appeared in translation in Literature, Culture and History in Victorian England: A Festschrift for Professor Matsumura (Tokyo: Eiho-sha, 1999. 68-89).]

Of Hans Christian Andersen's two hundred and more short pieces, less than twenty appeared in volumes subtitled "Told for Children," and these volumes were the first few, published when the young and impecunious Danish author was desperate for a share of the market (see De Mylius, 168-69). His dedications to Dickens soon confirmed that he had no intention of limiting his audience to children. In the event, many other eminent Victorians besides Thackeray were greatly taken with his work. Not all were put off, as Dickens eventually was, by his personal gaucheness and egotism. Indeed, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's last poem, inspired by Andersen's visit to Italy in 1861, extols him not only as a "seer" with "a poet's tongue," but also as "a man of men" ("The North and the South"). Consequently, Andersen as well as the Grimms had a pervasive and profound effect on Victorian fiction throughout the period. Fairy tales were written even by major figures like Ruskin ("The King of the Golden River") and even the major novels "are moulded by fairy-tale themes and structures" (Wullschläger 101). Like the drenched girl who knocks on the city gate in a storm at the beginning of Andersen's "The Princess and the Pea," the plainly dressed Jane Eyre wins the hero by her extraordinary sensitivity; like the ungainly chick in "The Ugly Duckling," Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss is one of many plain or tomboyish young heroines who turn into beauties. And even though successive Victorian translators sought to push his tales further and further into the nursery, one of the writers most directly influenced by Andersen was working at the very end of the period. This was Oscar Wilde, whose own fairy tales play more elaborately, sometimes less successfully, but always intriguingly on ideas, themes and motifs introduced by the Danish author.

As for Thackeray himself, he adopts a very similar narrative persona to Andersen, shaking his head over the follies of his characters and sighing slightly mockingly with them over their disappointed loves. If this stance is egotistical, it is something the two writers share. The later chapters of Vanity Fair, written after Thackeray's first enthralled acquaintance with Andersen's work, often echo his work. The green-eyed Becky Sharpe is memorably depicted in Chapter 64 as a siren with a fishy tail, the product of an undersea world as horribly evil as that inhabited by the sea-witch in Andersen's "Little Mermaid," and there is something of Andersen, too, in the long-suffering Dobbin's famous criticism of Amelia in Chapter 66 as unworthy of his great love. Like Andersen's "The Young Swineherd," the clumsy Dobbin has indeed turned out to be a prince in disguise, and Amelia deserves some home truths for failing to respond adequately to him, just as the Emperor's silly daughter does in that story. Significantly, Geoffrey Tillotson finds an allusion to Andersen's "The Snow-Queen" in a letter "justifying the 'dissatisfying' ending of Vanity Fair (208; see Letters 2: 423ff.). After this, fairy tale devices came to dominate Thackeray's plots more and more, with heroes like George Esmond in The Virginians being rewarded for their struggles by sudden changes of fortune. Thackeray made fun of the fairy tale genre in The Rose and the Ring: A Fireside Pantomime for Great or Small Children, but his serious novels were deeply permeated by it.

The same can be and has been said of Dickens. Harry Stone has demonstrated convincingly how, "[t]hrough the magic and technique of fairy tales, Dickens found that he could convey life in its exactitude, while at the same time dramatizing and commenting on that deceptive exactitude and depicting its intricate mystery" (69). The result, in a novel like Great Expectations, is "a more profound and complete realism" (197). Like Stone, most critics concentrate on the influence on Dickens of his childhood reading. Q. D. Leavis, however, pays special attention to Dickens's reading of Andersen as an adult. Instead of simply recalling the novelist's relief after his Danish house-guest's departure, and dismissing the whole thing as rather a comic interlude, Leavis suggests that Dickens's familiarity with Andersen's work made its own subtle and valuable contributions to his art. For example, Leavis notes Dickens's "rapture at, and confessed constant re-reading of, Andersen's tale 'The Old House'" (131-32). This is not one of the popular tales at all. It tells of a young boy who becomes fascinated by a dilapidated old house opposite his own, and at length pays two visits to the lonely old man who lives there, taking him a little tin soldier for company. Leavis suggests that Andersen's ability to recapture his little hero's consciousness in this story inspired the opening chapters of David Copperfield. Indeed, "The Old House" appeared in A Christmas Greeting to My English Friends before it even appeared in Denmark, and it was in the year following its publication in 1847 that Dickens began to turn his mind increasingly to his own childhood past. He began the novel which was to be "his favourite child" at the end of February 1849, and wrote with a new inwardness of David Copperfield's very earliest memories of his first home. Critics have long wondered how Dickens came to achieve this inwardness, insisting that he must have read the Brontës — despite his own disclaimers (see Ackroyd 837). But if any literary explanation is needed, surely his avowed enjoyment of "The Old House" provides a much better one. Leavis could have picked out more specific and distinct echoes of Andersen, too. As a "chilled, anxious, ragged" child, Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend, for example, cries out to the angels, "Take me up and make me light!" (290), a curious way of asking for release which may well take something from "The Little Match Girl," first published about twenty years before.

Likely and specific (rather than general) examples of Andersen's influence can also be found in other major authors' works. One such is in Silas Marner, which George Eliot said in a letter of 24 February 1861 came to her as "a sort of legendary tale" (Letters 3: 382). Here, Silas's years of loneliness and desolation are banished by the happiness of caring for a child, much as Ib's are in Andersen's "Ib and Little Christina"; like Ib's little charge, Silas's too is associated with gold, sunshine and joy. Even her name, Eppie, carries a hint of Andersen's story about it. A. S. Byatt claims that "George Eliot was a writer who 'used' or reworked incidents and themes from her early reading more than most" (548), and the ending of The Mill on the Floss provides another example. Sibling attachment is sublimated here in a scene which could have come straight out of Andersen: when Maggie and Tom Tulliver are borne down by the flood through the "gold water," and sink beneath it "in an embrace never to be parted," it is a "supreme moment" like so many in Andersen's work when death comes in a radiant burst of overwhelming love (542).

However, links between Andersen and Victorian literature are nowhere clearer than in the writings of Oscar Wilde. Extraordinary as it may seem, this young, brilliant and fashionable fin de sicle aesthete found a soul-mate in the poorly educated, socially inept and strikingly ugly Danish writer. The two writers' tones of voice are sometimes indistinguishable. Naturally, this is most obvious in Wilde's fairy stories, where, like Andersen, he often uses animals, plants and inanimate objects to express the affectation of officialdom, the limited world-view of the literati, and (above all) the bitter-sweet and often unrecognized sacrifices of the truly sensitive soul. Perhaps a sense of victimization is what binds the two writers' work most closely. At first sight, Wilde's "The Remarkable Rocket" about the self-important firework whose only impact is on a silly goose, reads most like one of Andersen's tales. But here Wilde seems to be mocking himself, something which Andersen only rarely does. Closer in spirit to the Andersen of, say, "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" are "The Happy Prince" and "The Nightingale and the Rose." In these well-known works, Wilde presents the theme of self-sacrifice through a statue and two birds whose hearts are moved by others, but whose efforts to alleviate their sufferings pass unrecognized in an ungrateful world. Both Andersen's tin soldier and Wilde's statue are thrown into fires in the end; but, much as the former melts to a heart-shaped lump, so the latter's lead heart survives, to be taken (together with the dead swallow which had comforted him) straight to God. It is worth pointing out that Wilde's stories are taken very seriously by the critics; only a few, notably "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant," are seen as tales specifically for children.

Left: I perceived him loosening my shadow, by George Cruikshank, from Adlebert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl. Middle: I sought shelter behind the cake-woman's petticoats, by Honor Appleton, from the Nelson edition of Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, 1932. Right: The Transformation. "Great God! Can it be!!" Theatrical Poster for an American performance of R. L. Stevensen's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, from the Library of Congress Digital Image gallery, late 1880s.

Wilde's version of "The Little Mermaid," entitled "The Fisherman and his Soul," demands special attention. It is more elaborate than Andersen's, and its convolutions suggest that the fairy tale form was now too constraining for Wilde. But the main problem may be that he had another of Andersen's stories in mind here as well. This was "The Shadow," a reworking of an earlier narrative to which Andersen actually refers in his tale, though not by name — this was Peter Schlemihl (1814), by the German writer Adelbert von Chamisso. Andersen greatly shortens the original, and uses it to take vicarious revenge on his patron's son Edvard Collin, who had a great hold over him and yet refused to address him familiarly. The main protagonist is a learned man (presumably based on Collin) whose shadow (representing Andersen himself) enters the abode of Poetry and takes on a separate life of its own. The shadow then becomes fleshed out, dresses elegantly and gains power because of his insight into the dark springs of human behaviour. Then he returns to the learned man and enslaves him, finally having him killed so that he can enjoy his life without fear of being found out. Not one of Andersen's better known tales, and far from endearing, "The Shadow" is nevertheless powerful and intriguing, and it evidently caught Wilde's eye. In "The Fisherman and His Soul," Wilde makes it necessary for the fisherman to give up his soul in order for him to enter the mermaid's world, and it is cut from him as his shadow. Then, like the learned man's shadow in Andersen's story, this one too begins to live a life of its own, eventually managing to get the fisherman to accompany him. In the end, the fisherman dies as well, his heart breaking in an embrace with the mermaid he can no longer rejoin under the sea. The water washes over them as it does over Maggie and Tom Tulliver at the end of The Mill on the Floss.

No doubt both Andersen's and Wilde's shadows express something of their authors' psychological depths, the sense they both seem to have had of another hidden and incipiently unmanageable self; perhaps, in both cases, the author's sexual orientation was involved. While that element of the theme over-complicates Wilde's "The Fisherman and His Soul," it also pointed the way forward for him, allowing him to express his own worries about his inner life. From now on the theme of split identity would particularly fascinate him, emerging most forcefully in The Picture of Dorian Gray, his powerful novella for adults. This illustrates perfectly Andersen's seminal influence on another important writer.

"The Shadow" has been praised by such critics as Q. D. Leavis (133), and taken to illustrate the Hegelian master/slave dialectic (Zipes 89-90). More broadly, it justifies the opinion of those who see Andersen himself as "a progressive mind, a child of the nineteenth century in its quest for the new, the hitherto unseen — a quest for light and redemption" — in effect, an "early modernist" (De Mylius 174, 176). Of course, the idea and technical ploy of the conflicted self, with its partial projection into a double and its expulsion from human society, goes far back in literary history, as does the search for some kind of epiphany or release. But from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in other words, from the arrival on the literary scene of Andersen himself, more and more Doppelgänger figures begin to appear, from, say, Tennyson's "Balin and Balan" in Idylls of the King" to, most famously, Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. The rise of the psychological and psychoanalytical sciences, instigated respectively by Herbert Spencer and Freud, gave added impetus to this trend.

This was something that infiltrated literature right across the board, and for readers of every age. As for shadows, perhaps the best-known of all is the one left behind by Peter Pan, when James Barrie's little hero flies away too hastily from the Darlings' window at the turn of the century. In this case, Wendy is able to reattach the shadow, so it never acquires a life of its own or becomes sinister, but the incident (in a chapter entitled "The Shadow") is just as much a sign of a deeply split psyche as Andersen's and Wilde's: Peter is visibly torn between the outside world, adventure and independence, and his yearning for safety and shelter. The even deeper implication in such divisions and contradictions is that character is not fixed but constantly in flux, constantly at odds with itself and others. In novels written for adults, the figure of the misfit, the wanderer, the crosser of boundaries and so forth becomes ever more prevalent in the 1920s, in the hands of writers like Herman Hesse (Steppenwolf) and Kafka (any of whose writings fit the bill). It might be said that Andersen just picked up and ran with a figure already literally fleshed out by Chamisso: as Jens Andersen says, fairy tale reflected the zeitgist "like no other literary activity during the first half of the 19th century" (248). Still, the Danish writer's influence on Wilde is indisputable. How appropriate that the uneasy and conflicted Andersen should have helped this figure on its way, opening up possibilities for the "cultivation of uncertainty" that marks the modern age (Miller viii). This alone should secure him an important place in the history of adult as well as children's literature.

Related Material

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Andersen, Jens. Hans Christian Andersen. Trans. Tiina Nunnally. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005.

Byatt, A. S. Appendix: "The Placing of Stephen Guest." The Mill on the Floss. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. 545-549.

Chamisso, Adelbert von. Peter Schlemiel. Trans. Sir John Bowering. London: Robert Hardwicke, 1861. Available here.

De Mylius, Johan. "'Our time is the time of the fairy tale': Hans Christian Andersen between Traditional Craft and Literary Modernism." Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. Vol. 20, No.2 (2006). 166-178.

Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9 vols. Vol. 3. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.

———The Mill on the Floss. Ed. A. S. Byatt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Leavis, Q.D. "Dickens and Tolstoy: The Case for a Serious View of David Copperfield. Dickens the Novelist, by F.R. and Q.D. Leavis. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 60-164.

Stone, Harry. Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray. Ed. Gordon N. Ray. 4 Vols. Vol 2. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1946.

Tillotson, Geoffrey. Thackeray the Novelist. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1954.

Wullschläger, Jackie. Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and A.A. Milne. London: Methuen, 1995.

Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. London: Routledge, 1995.


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Last modified 12 December 2008