Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People

by Baron Arthur Ponsonby Ponsonby; Dorothea Ponsonby

It matters not to have been born in a duck-yard, if one has been hatched from a swan’s egg.

This is the story of Hans Andersen, the son of a poor cobbler and his wife a washerwoman. Nearly every child in the world has read his Fairy Stories, and the romance of his own life is almost as marvelous as one of these—more marvelous, perhaps, because it is really true. All the things he dreamt of—all the things he longed to happen, came true, so that when he was fifty he wrote it down and called it “The Story of My Life.”

Hans Andersen was born rather more than a hundred years ago in the ancient city of Odense, in Denmark. His parents were very poor, so poor that they had only one room under a steep gabled roof. In this room, which was kitchen, workshop, parlor, and bedroom, Hans Andersen opened his eyes, to the sound of his father hammering shoes. He was born in a great bed with curtains—which had been made by his father out of a nobleman’s coffin; there were bits of ragged crape still hanging about the woodwork of the bed. The little room which was Hans’ home was to him exciting and delightful beyond measure. It was full of all sorts of things—the walls were covered with pictures, and the tables and chests had shiny cups and glasses and jugs upon them. The room was always decorated with fresh birch and beech boughs, and bunches of sweet herbs hung from the rafters. In the lattice window grew pots of mint. Close to the window was the cobbler’s workshop and a shelf of books. The door was painted with rough landscapes, and when the little boy was in bed he would gaze at these and make up stories about them. His father and mother, before they came to bed, would say to one another in low voices how nice and quiet Hans was, believing him to be asleep—when he was really wide awake enjoying his own thoughts and fancies about the pictures. Between the Andersens’ cottage and their neighbor’s there stood a box of earth, which Andersen’s mother planted with chives and parsley. This was their garden, and you can read about it in the “Snow Queen.” As Hans grew up he thought there was nothing so nice in the world as his own little home, and he loved to beautify it with garlands of flowers and wild plants, which he would put about in glasses. He was very fond of his mother, who was not, it seems, a particularly attractive woman. She was good-natured, but silly and thriftless, never thinking of the morrow so long as they had a roof over their heads that day. She was careless, too, about Hans as an infant, and was in the truest sense of the word uneducated. Hans got his love of reading and his imagination from his unsuccessful, unhappy father. The cobbler was a far more educated person than his wife, and he was better born. But owing to his family’s misfortunes—for they had come down in the world—he was obliged, much against his will, to take up shoemaking; this work he settled down to with a sad and bitter heart. All his spare time he gave to reading. Books became his one comfort. He was never seen to smile except when he was reading. Sometimes he would read aloud in the evenings and his wife would gaze at him completely puzzled—not understanding, but admiring him all the same.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

As Hans grew older, he and his father became great friends, and they went long walks together; and while his father sat and thought or read, Hans ran about picking wild strawberries and making pretty garlands of flowers. The cobbler certainly rather neglected his shoemaking, and as he was different from his neighbors, they shunned him and thought all sorts of evil things about him. The cobbler’s one wish was to get away from the city and to live in the country. On hearing one day that the squire of a large village required a shoemaker about the place, he offered himself as such. Then he would have a cottage and a little garden and perhaps a cow. The squire’s wife sent him a piece of silk to make a specimen of dancing shoes. For the next few days the family could talk of nothing else but these shoes and of their hopes for the future. Hans prayed to God to fulfil his father’s wishes. At last the shoes were finished and were gazed upon with admiration by Hans and his mother. Off went the cobbler with the shoes wrapped up in his apron—while his little family waited in impatience and anxiety at home. When the cobbler returned his face was quite pale and they saw something dreadful had happened. He told them the squire’s wife had not even tried on the shoes. She had just looked at them, and said the silk was spoiled and that she would not require him as shoemaker. The cobbler then and there took out his knife and cut the poor shoes in pieces. So all their hopes were dashed to the ground; their rosy hopes of a life in the country with a cow and a garden faded like a dream, and they wept.

Hans Andersen as a child had no boy friends, and he hardly did any lessons, but he was very far from being bored, because he had such a lively imagination and could always invent games and stories for himself. His father would make him toys, pictures that changed their shapes when pulled with a string, and a mill which made the miller dance when it went round, and peep-shows of funny rag dolls. What he liked best was making dolls’ clothes. In the little garden he would sit for hours near the one gooseberry-bush. This, with the help of a broomstick and his mother’s apron, he made into a little tent, and there he would sit in all weathers, fancying things and inventing stories. Very occasionally he went to a school, and at one school he made friends with a little girl and would tell her stories. They were mostly about himself—how he was of noble birth only the fairies had changed him in his cradle, and all sorts of other inventions. One day he heard the little girl say, “He is a fool like his grandpapa,” and poor Hans trembled and never spoke to her about these things again. He had a mad old grandfather at the lunatic asylum, where he sometimes went. His grandmother, the mother of his father, was a dear old lady who looked after the garden of the asylum, and brought flowers to the Andersens every Sunday. She would recount to Hans stories of her youth—of her mother’s mother, who had been quite a grand lady, and of her own happy childhood in more prosperous circumstances. Strange sights Hans would see in the court at the asylum, sights that would haunt him for days and even years, so that he would beg his parents to put him in their big bed and draw the curtains that he might feel safe. He grew up religious in a sort of superstitious way, and this was his mother’s influence. He was shocked at his father, as his mother and the neighbors were—“there is no other devil than that which is in our own hearts,” said his father one day, and Andersen’s mother burst into tears and prayed to God to forgive his father. The cobbler died when Hans was only eleven years old, and he was left alone with his mother.

He continued to play with his toy theater and peep-shows and made dolls’ clothes. But he also read all he could lay hands on, and a great deal of Shakespeare, which made a deep impression on him. He liked best the plays where there are ghosts and witches—he felt he must go on the stage. He jotted down at this time the titles of twenty-five plays; the spelling of the titles being most peculiar!

Naturally young Hans Andersen was the laughing-stock of the neighborhood. Nobody understood him, and Hans singing in the lanes and sewing and reading at home was simply regarded as a lunatic. By the time he was fourteen he had not a single friend of his own age. Boys teased him, and screamed at him, “There goes the play scribbler,” so that Hans shrank from them and would hide himself at home from their mocking eyes and voices. He longed, like the ugly duckling of his story, for the companionship of people cleverer and nobler than himself.

He was indeed very funny to look at, quite comically ugly with his large nose and feet and very small Japanese eyes, and he was so tall and gawky that his clothes were always too small for him, which made him look still odder. He became persuaded that his voice was going to make his fortune, and an old woman who washed clothes in the river told Andersen that the Empire of China lay under the water there. Hans quite believed her. He thought to himself that perhaps one moonlight night, when he would be singing by the water’s edge, a Chinese Prince might push his way through the earth on hearing his song, and would take him down into his country and there make him rich and noble. Then he might let him visit Odense again, where he would live and build a castle, the envied and admired of everybody. Long after—Andersen says in his autobiography—when he was reading his poems and stories aloud in Copenhagen, he hoped for such a Prince to appear in the audience who would sympathize and help him.