Episode Details

When Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875, those preparing his body found a pouch over his heart containing a letter from a woman who had rejected him decades earlier. This deep dive goes far beyond the nursery to explore the remarkably messy life of the man behind The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, and The Snow Queen: born in 1805 in Odense to an illiterate washerwoman and a shoemaker who imagined himself of noble descent, apprenticed to a weaver and a tailor after his father's death, and bold enough at fourteen to move alone to Copenhagen to become an actor at the Royal Danish Theatre.

We follow his soprano voice breaking, the benefactor Jonas Collin who persuaded King Frederick VI to fund his schooling, the brutally abusive schoolmaster who tried to beat the poetry out of him, and the 1835 pivot when he published The Improvisatore and his first booklet of fairy tales for a meager thirty rigsdaler. We also examine the last-minute change to the ending of The Emperor's New Clothes, the Danish critics who loathed his chatty style, his passionate letters to Edvard Collin, his infatuation with a duke and the ballet dancer Harald Scharff, the failed proposal to Jenny Lind, and the disastrous five-week stay at Charles Dickens's home in 1857.

• How rigid Danish class structure made his move to Copenhagen an act of audacious desperation
• Why nineteenth-century critics saw entertaining children as a literary flaw
• The Undine legend behind The Little Mermaid and the child's shout he added to The Emperor's New Clothes
• How Jenny Lind's rejection inspired The Nightingale and the icy Snow Queen
• His funeral instruction that the music keep time with little steps for the children who would follow