Søren Kierkegaard
In "Andersen as a Novelist", Søren Kierkegaard remarks that Andersen is characterized as "a possibility of a personality, wrapped up in such a web of arbitrary moods and moving through an elegiac duo-decimal scaled of almost echoless, dying tones just as easily roused as subdued, who, in order to become a personality, needs a strong life-development."[26]
Andersen statue at the Rosenborg Castle Gardens, CopenhagenMeetings with Charles Dickens
In June 1847, Andersen visited England for the first time, enjoying triumphant social success. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her parties where many intellectuals would meet, and at one such party he met Charles Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the veranda, which Andersen noted in his diary: "We were on the veranda, and I was so happy to see and speak to England's now-living writer whom I do love the most."[27]
The two authors respected each other's work and as writers, and had in common their depictions of the underclass who often had difficult lives affected both by the Industrial Revolution and by abject poverty.
Ten years later, Andersen visited England again, primarily to meet Dickens. He extended the planned brief visit to Dickens' home at Gads Hill Place into a five-week stay, much to the distress of Dickens' family. After Andersen was told to leave, Dickens gradually stopped all correspondence between them, to Andersen's great disappointment and confusion; he had enjoyed the visit and never understood why his letters went unanswered.[27]
It is suspected that Dickens modeled the physical appearance and mannerisms of Uriah Heep from David Copperfield after Andersen.[28]
Romantic relationships
In Andersen's early life, his private journal records his refusal to have sexual relations.[29][30]
Andersen experienced homosexual attraction;[31] he wrote to Edvard Collin:[32] "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench ... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery."[33] Collin wrote in his own memoir, "I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering." Andersen's infatuation with Karl Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach,[34] did result in a relationship:
The Hereditary Grand Duke walked arm in arm with me across the courtyard of the castle to my room, kissed me lovingly, asked me always to love him though he was just an ordinary person, asked me to stay with him this winter ... Fell asleep with the melancholy, happy feeling that I was the guest of this strange prince at his castle and loved by him ... It is like a fairy tale.[31]
There is a sharp division in opinion over Andersen's physical fulfillment in the sexual sphere. Jackie Wullschlager's biography maintains he was possibly lovers with Danish dancer Harald Scharff[35] and Andersen's "The Snowman" was inspired by their relationship.[36] Scharff first met Andersen when the latter was in his fifties. Andersen was infatuated and Wullschlager sees his journals as implying that their relationship was sexual.[37] Scharff had various dinners alone with Andersen and gifted a silver toothbrush to Andersen on his fifty-seventh birthday.[38] Wullschlager asserts that in the winter of 1861–62, the two men entered an affair that brought Andersen "joy, some kind of sexual fulfillment, and a temporary end to loneliness."[39] He was not discreet in his conduct with Scharff, and displayed his feelings openly. Onlookers regarded the relationship as improper and ridiculous. In his diary in March 1862, Andersen referred to this time in his life as his "erotic period".[40] On 13 November 1863, Andersen wrote, "Scharff has not visited me in eight days; with him it is over."[41] Andersen took this calmly and the two thereafter met in overlapping social circles without bitterness, though Andersen attempted to rekindle their relationship a number of times without success.[42][note 1][note 2][43] According to Wullschlager, "Andersen's diaries leave no doubt that he was attracted to both sexes; that at times he longed for a physical relationship with a woman and that at other times he was involved in physical liaisons with men."[3] For example, Wullschlager quotes from Andersen's diaries:
"Scharff bounded up to me; threw himself round my neck and kissed me! .... Nervous in the evening" Five days later he received "a visit from Scharff, who was very intimate and nice". In the following weeks, there was "dinner at Scharff's, who was ardent and loving" [3]
The claim that Andersen entertained "physical liaisons" with men has been contested by Klara Bom and Anya Aarenstrup from the H. C. Andersen Centre of University of Southern Denmark. They state
"it is correct to point to the very ambivalent (and also very traumatic) elements in Andersen's emotional life concerning the sexual sphere, but it is decidedly just as wrong to describe him as homosexual and maintain that he had physical relationships with men. He did not. Indeed, that would have been entirely contrary to his moral and religious ideas, aspects that are quite outside the field of vision of Wullschlager and her like."[44]
Wullschlager in fact argued that, because of moral and religious ideas of his time, Andersen could not be open about his homosexual relationships.
Andersen also fell in love with unattainable women, and many interpret references to them in his stories.[45] At one point, he wrote in his diary: "Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!"[46] A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of Andersen's youth. A small pouch containing a long letter from Voigt was found on Andersen's chest when he died, several decades after he first fell in love with her. Other disappointments in love included Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted; and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin. One of his stories, "The Nightingale", was written as an expression of his passion for Jenny Lind and was the inspiration for her nickname, the "Swedish Nightingale".[47] Andersen was shy around women and had extreme difficulty proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to go to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings towards him were not the same; she saw him as a brother, writing to him in 1844: "farewell ... God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny".[48] It is suggested that Andersen expressed his disappointment by portraying Lind as the eponymous antihero of The Snow Queen.[49]
