Binding observes, ‘Andersen’s relationship with Edvard Collin is, in truth, the single most significant one in his life, and a prime animating presence in his oeuvre.’ Later, he notes that the Collin family was the only one Andersen really knew. A problem lay in the differences in their social positions. Edvard Collin liked to reprimand Andersen for how he behaved socially; his seemingly awkward performance of an authorial persona that mediated Andersen’s great confidence in his writing and fears about how he, as someone from a poor background, was seen by those more powerful.

Hans Christien Andersen, 1869 (photograph by Thora Hallager)

When Andersen suggested to Edvard that the two of them set aside a customary formal mode of address in favour of the informal ‘Du’, Edvard declined. The rejection was a defining injury in Andersen’s life; he ‘never got over this refusal’ and carried it into many of his works. To Andersen, it marked a limit placed on his love for Edvard and at the same time formed a reminder that he would never match Edvard’s assured place in the world: ‘handsome, masculine in a traditional mould, and so at home in the society into which he had been born that he did not need to look beyond it.’

Fortunately, Andersen did look beyond it, not only in his fairy tales but also in his novels and travel writing, discussions of which form the most interesting and original aspects of this book. In Copenhagen, people made fun of Andersen’s self-absorbed manner, but in his travels he found the beginning of a ‘literary career proper’, and, as is clear from Binding’s account, he also found social and cultural material which frame more personal concerns. His first journey led to the travelogue Shadow Pictures (1831) and the novel The Improvisatore (1835), which, though largely overlooked today, had an influence on Dickens, Andersen’s most famous contemporary admirer. Much later, when Andersen overstayed his welcome at the Dickens household, Dickens also became the most famous person to be irritated by Andersen’s needful and at times melodramatic personality.

Charles Dickens

Those traits inevitably found their way into his novels, works that Andersen’s compatriot Georg Brandes (1842–1927) viewed as inferior to the fairy tales. Certainly, they may never match the strange brilliance of works like ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837), ‘The Ice Maiden’ (1861), or ‘The Ugly Duckling’ (1843), some of which were, in their way, as autobiographical as the novels. But Binding shows us that Andersen’s fiction developed from a twin concern with the problems of his private life and with the post-Napoleonic Europe in which he travelled, a duality that forms a case for their greater appreciation today.

Throughout, Binding conducts this case through analytical summaries of Andersen’s prose works (his poems and plays are left largely untreated). These summaries, which combine synopses of the works’ content with biographical information, source analysis, and close reading, are unusually long and rather personal in how they present and interpret Andersen’s key works. The result is a book that does not belong clearly to either literary biography or literary criticism, and the argument for Andersen as a European witness is seldom presented in a sufficiently direct way.

However, Binding takes us to many sites, both intellectual and material, that clearly impacted on Andersen’s imagination. We gain a better understanding of Andersen as a person of his time and his influences, rather than merely as the creator of what were, in a sense, the timeless settings of many of his best-known stories. ‘The Little Mermaid’ drew on an earlier text Undine (1811) by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843); ‘The Shadow’ (1847) was indebted to Adelbert von Chamisso’s ‘Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story’ (1814); while ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ (1837) is analysed in relation to its medieval source, El Conde Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel (1282–1349). As is often the case with great writers who borrow from earlier authors, ‘appreciation of this closeness only makes clearer the independent-mindedness’ of Andersen’s writing, ‘and its significance for its own times’.

Those times and the changes they brought come through very clearly in Andersen’s 1840 journey to Constantinople, as told in his diary entries and in A Poet’s Bazaar (1842). This was a more mature travelogue than Shadow Pictures. Andersen’s writing was clearly still animated by intense personal longing – in his diary entry upon leaving Copenhagen, he wrote that Edvard ‘pressed a kiss onto my mouth. Oh, it was as if my heart would burst.’ But by now he was able to write in a more balanced way about himself. He also showed himself to be capable of undertaking difficult journeys, deliberately opting for a perilous route along the Danube, and as a result witnessing firsthand the unrest caused by the Tanzimât reforms of the Ottoman Empire, which had begun in 1839.

In the second part of his life, Andersen also witnessed the major constitutional reforms of his own country and, in later years, the increasing and at times dispiriting rate of modernisation. In a diary entry of 1870, responding to criticism of his novel Lucky Peer (1870), he noted, ‘our age has no use for weakness, only strength’. And yet his life and work demonstrate something else, a lesson that fairy tales also teach us. Often, it is the weak and the more sensitive among us who see the world as it really is.