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There once was an ugly duckling, so despised by the other birds that he fled the farm to explore the wider world. But because of his very great ugliness he was taunted there too, until one day he caught his image reflected in a pond and he had turned into a beautiful swan. The Ugly Duckling, first published in 1843, was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s many autobiographical fairy tales: “It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard,” he wrote, “if one has lain in a swan’s egg.”

Andersen’s subject, from the start, was the outsider destined for greatness. “At school,” he recalled in The Fairy Tale of My Life, the third of his three memoirs, “I told the boys curious stories in which I was always the chief person, but was sometimes ridiculed for that.” His stories were miniature epics (The Princess and the Pea is 300 words long) and his characters, like the author himself, solitary figures of spiritual greatness for whom the world is a place of inexplicable cruelty. Other versions of Andersen’s life can be found in his first published fairy tale, The Tinderbox, in which a clever soldier discovers the magic formula for wealth and success; The Steadfast Tin Soldier, in which a one-legged, love-sick toy falls from a window, is swallowed by a fish, and then thrown into a stove where he melts into a heart-shaped lump; and The Little Match Girl, where a frozen, homeless child, on her last night on Earth, gazes through a window at a happy bourgeois family. 

Had Andersen been as handsome as Danny Kaye, who played him in the Hollywood musical Hans Christian Andersen (1952), he would not have become a teller of tales. It was his fabulous ugliness that fuelled his ambition. “I shall have no success with my appearance,” he reflected, “so I make use of whatever is available.” 

Everyone who met him remarked on his appearance. As a 20-year-old student in Copenhagen, he was described as “a lanky figure in a worn-out grey coat whose sleeves did not reach his emaciated wrists”. As a 40-year-old celebrity in a London drawing-room, he was described as “long, thin, fleshless, boneless… wriggling and bending like a lizard with a lantern-jawed, cadaverous visage”. He described himself in one of his poems as having a nose “as mighty as a cannon” and eyes as “tiny” as “green peas”. Edmund Gosse was “almost painfully struck… by the grotesque ugliness of his face and hands, and by his enormously long and swinging arms”. Andersen’s friend William Bloch also recalled his “out of proportion” arms and legs, together with his “broad and flat” hands, and “feet of such gigantic dimensions” that no one would ever steal his boots. 

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Added to this were what Bloch called Andersen’s “strange and bizarre” movements, and others noted his “ludicrous” manners and “obsequious contortions”, including deep theatrical bows. Heinrich Heine, the living writer Andersen most admired, mistook him for “a tailor” because of his “fawning servility”. If he sounds like a character invented by Charles Dickens, it is because Uriah Heep was modelled on Andersen, whom Dickens met in 1847. 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 you’re a man, control your limbs, sir!” In our own kinder age, we might diagnose Andersen with dyspraxia. 

The life of Andersen was indeed the stuff of fairy tales. He was born in 1805 in a one-room cottage in the poorest part of Odense, a town on the Danish island of Funen rich in folk heritage. His father was a cobbler whose workshop was also in the cottage, and his mother was an illiterate washerwoman; his aunt ran a brothel, and his grandfather was insane. As a boy, Andersen watched the old man carve wooden figures with beasts’ heads, which he then gave to the village children. It was in the spinning room of the asylum where his grandmother was employed that he first heard the fairy tales that transfixed him, and when, on forest walks, his father told him tales from The Arabian Nights, Andersen knew he was destined to be another Scheherazade. 

Andersen, a dreamy and effeminate only child, preferred his own company. His favourite pastime was the toy theatre made by his father, for which he wrote plays to be performed by the dolls whose clothes he designed and sewed. His first production was a tragedy taken from a song in Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within the play performed by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Everyone was obliged to hear my play,” Andersen recalled in his first memoir, The True Story of My Life, written when he was 27 and not yet a household name. “It was a perfect treat for me to read it, and it never occurred to me that my audience might not experience the same pleasure in listening.” Andersen’s performances were mocked by the street boys who chased him home, where he wept. He also had a fine soprano voice, and was known, he recalls, as “The Funen Nightingale”. In his fairy tale The Nightingale, the bird’s voice becomes famous and moves emperors to tears, until he is replaced by an automaton.  

Andersen became a great writer because he was a great listener: he learned as a child that a story’s power lay in its capacity to be  retained. “Pleasure in listening” was vital: a strong and rhythmic narrative embeds itself and Andersen remembered, word for word, every tale he ever heard and every play he ever saw. 

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,” Andersen 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.

When he was 11, his father died and Andersen took a job in a factory where he had his trousers pulled down to prove he was a man. Aged 14, he left behind his roots “as a swamp plant” to make his fortune in Copenhagen. “First you go through an awful lot, and then you become famous,” he explained to his anxious mother, as though the plot of his life had been written already.

His aim was to make money as an actor, ballet dancer or singer; any future success, he realised, involved assuming a role. He had to disguise his homosexuality, but adapting to bourgeois culture involved a similar loss of selfhood, a process described in his terrifying tale The Shadow, where a man’s shadow takes on an independent life and destroys the body to which it was once attached. 

An assiduous self-promoter, Andersen introduced himself to the impresarios of the city, and despite the poverty and hardship of the next decade he never went unnoticed. His voice broke, he quickly grew too tall for ballet, and the only acting role he was given was a troll. But it was while he was working at the Royal Court Theatre that his talent as a writer was spotted by the company’s financial controller Jonas Collin, to whom he read aloud his tragic plays. Collin arranged for Andersen, now aged 17, to go to a grammar school, where he sat in a class with 11-year-olds. 

His first published poem, “The Dying Child”, written when he left school aged 21, drew on the experience of being terrorised by his sadistic headmaster. “Mother, I’m so tired, I want to sleep now” the poem begins, the child of sensibility catching the mood of European Romanticism. 

Andersen’s headmaster denounced the work as “sentimentality and idle trash”, but it was published in a German newspaper and then the Copenhagen Post, before becoming a sensation in France. “The Dying Child” belongs in the world of Lyrical Ballads (1798), where Wordsworth and Coleridge also gave a voice to the voiceless, such as children, vagrants, demobbed soldiers and mad mothers. 

The following year Andersen self-published his first book, A Walking Tour from the Holmen Canal to the Eastern Point of Amager in the Years 1828 and 1829. The title, as the citizens of Copenhagen knew, was a joke because the distance from the Holmen canal, where Andersen lived in a garret room, to the Eastern Point of Amager was just three kilometres. 

The journey takes place not over two years but during a single night: the narrator begins his walk late on the evening of 31 December 1828 and arrives at his destination in the early hours of 1 January 1829. On the way, he meets characters such as St Peter, Death, and a talking cat. His “fantastic arabesque”, as Andersen called it, which anticipated Ulysses while parodying the aristocratic Grand Tour, instantly sold out. He then wrote a play in which the audience chose the ending: this too triumphed, with the audience crying “Long live the author!” 

Ten years after leaving home, Andersen had made his name. His next book, a fictional autobiography called The Improvisatore: Or, Life in Italy, published in 1835 when he was 29, was another success. 

A Romantic poem, a fantastic arabesque, an interactive play, a novel: we associate Andersen only with fairy tales, but for his contemporaries it was anyone’s guess what he would write next. 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”. 

Andersen, who died 150 years ago this month, resented being reduced to a writer for children: his 160 fairy tales were written not for the nursery but the child in us all. The reason we have failed to appreciate the grandeur of his art is because we no longer understand the role of the storyteller, a figure now rare to the point of extinction. I see Andersen as neither an ugly duckling nor a swan, but one of the sculptor Barry Flanagan’s giant bronze hares, cavorting in a parallel universe. He saw himself, however, not as an earthly being at all but “one who seemed”, as he told Dickens, “to have fallen from the skies”.

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This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent