Hans Christian Andersen

At fourteen, Hans Christian Andersen left Odense for Copenhagen with no job waiting and one fixed idea: he would enter the Royal Theatre as an actor, singer, or dancer. He had spent much of childhood apart from other boys, absorbed in puppet plays, costumes, stories, and songs. Praise for his high singing voice had convinced him that imagination and nerve might be enough.

For three years, they were not. Andersen pleaded for auditions, took singing and dance instruction, and reached the theatre’s schools, but never secured a durable place. His voice changed, ending the strongest case for him as a singer. Acting and ballet offered no rescue. A tragedy he submitted to the theatre was judged useless for the stage. By 1822, the route he had crossed Denmark to pursue had nearly run out.

Jonas Collin, a director of the Royal Theatre, read one of those failed plays differently. The theatre still judged it unusable, but its directors found enough promise to recommend education before another attempt. Collin obtained an annual grant from King Frederik VI and free instruction for Andersen at the grammar school in Slagelse. He would manage the money, follow Andersen’s progress, and receive his requests directly. “Write to me without restraint about everything which you require, and tell me how it goes with you,” Andersen remembered him saying.

The opportunity exposed a second problem. At seventeen, Andersen entered the lowest class beside much younger boys. “I knew indeed nothing at all,” he later wrote. Grammar, geography, and mathematics overwhelmed him, while the headmaster, Simon Meisling, ridiculed wrong answers. Andersen did make progress, but praise and good reports could not stop his confidence from shrinking.

The arrangement worsened after Meisling moved to the grammar school at Helsingør and Andersen went with him, boarding in the headmaster’s home. Outside school hours the door was commonly locked, Andersen recalled, and he was left to study Latin or remain indoors. Meisling’s contempt became part of daily life. Andersen blamed himself in letters rather than describing all that was happening, yet the despair in them alarmed Collin.

When another teacher finally reported the conditions, Collin removed Andersen from both the school and Meisling’s house. He did not abandon the education he had arranged. He moved Andersen back to Copenhagen, paid for private tuition, and kept the route to the student examination open. Andersen passed it in 1828.

His book debut followed in 1829. In 1835 he published both the novel The Improvisatore and the first installment of Fairy Tales, Told for Children. He would publish more than 150 fairy tales and stories through 1872, including “The Little Mermaid,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Snow Queen,” and “The Ugly Duckling.”

Collin’s first solution had serious costs, and patronage on this scale was rare. What made his support durable was not that the original plan worked. He secured the missing education, stayed close enough to receive Andersen’s anxious letters and school reports, and changed the setting when better evidence showed that the setting itself had become the danger.