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  • More Than Meets the Eye: Hans Christian Andersen and Nineteenth-Century American Criticism
  • Christoph Irmscher
More Than Meets the Eye: Hans Christian Andersen and Nineteenth-Century American Criticism. By Herbert Rowland. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2006. 280 pp. Cloth, $52.50.

Among the Longfellow papers at Harvard's Houghton Library, there is a letter by Hans Christian Andersen to his "kjaere, beundrede Ven," his dear admired friend. "Were not the big ocean between us," Andersen wrote on 24 March 1868 in his native language, which he knew Longfellow spoke and read with ease, "then I would come to you." A few years later, he repeated the same wishful fantasy, this time in halting English, imagining how, were it not for the long voyage, he would soon "arrive in your mighty country some pleasant summerday" [sic]. Andersen never came, but, as Herbert Rowland's compelling study of nineteenth-century American reviews of Andersen's work suggests, he had, in more intangible ways, long been present in Longfellow's "mighty country." American readers loved Andersen, if not for the right reasons. Longfellow began reading him in 1847, the year the first volley of Andersen reviews appeared in American periodicals such as the Literary World and Godey's Lady's Book. His favorite Andersen story was "The Constant Tin Soldier," though he thoroughly disliked Mary Howitt's "slipshod" translation, an opinion not shared, as Rowland shows, by most American reviewers. (As late as 1872, Whitelaw Reid praised Howitt in the New York Tribune for having retained "the charm of the author's style.") Since the Danish texts were not easily available to him, Longfellow willy-nilly also read Andersen's autobiography in Howitt's distorted version: "Andersen's 'Story of My Life,'" he wrote, "has inspired me again for Danish literature."

If Rowland is right—and his book is so carefully researched and meticulously documented that one would be foolish to doubt the results—Longfellow's Andersen fascination was both predictable and unusual for his time. Andersen's fairy tales were widely admired, but Longfellow did not regard him as primarily a writer of "graceful juveniles," as the Southern Literary Messenger put it. In fact, Longfellow first encountered Andersen when his brilliant wife Fanny read the Wonder Stories to him as part of their regular evening entertainments, which also included at various points in time Cervantes's Don Quijote, Melville's Typee, and Heine's poems. Longfellow [End Page 180] also did not limit his reading to the fairy tales or the autobiography; during the following years, he acquired not only Andersen's popular "Italian" novel The Improvisatore but also the far less familiar To Be or Not to Be?, an 1857 novel Andersen had dedicated to Charles Dickens. Last but not least, Longfellow never attempted, as so many American reviewers did, "to turn Andersen's work to [his] own ideological purposes." Instead, he was interested in what Andersen had to tell him about Denmark and Danish literature, not in the light he might shed on American culture.

As Rowland shows in an impressive chapter on "general interest articles," American reviewers from Bayard Taylor to Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen celebrated Andersen's biography as a kind of American-style rags-to-riches story, the capitalist version of a fairy tale in which the son of a poor cobbler and an illiterate, superstitious washerwoman "by dint of genius had risen from the lowest origin to a world-wide fame." More Than Meets the Eye includes an unforgettable profile view of Andersen's face, which, serene in its ugliness, still retains the features of the boy from rural Odense—"the only kangaroo among the beauty," as Emily Dickinson, who has more in common with Andersen than might be readily apparent, once said about herself.

And it was those features that haunted the American reviewers, especially the ones who traveled to Denmark and met the man in the flesh. Throughout More Than Meets the Eye, Rowland has a hard time hiding his disappointment that Americans did not show more maturity in their critical dealings with Andersen's œuvre. He is not even sure that everyone who offered an opinion on him had...

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