Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness by Paul Binding (review)

Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness is Paul Binding’s enthusiastic endorsement of the work of Andersen as a major European literary figure whose significance reaches far beyond than of a children’s writer. Binding situates the Danish writer (truly a poetic genius of the romantic age) as an enlightened “European witness” in the mainstream of nineteenth-century literary, philosophical, and scientific currents that shaped a remarkable century of social transformation. Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), the only son of an itinerant shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman, was born into an impoverished social milieu (the “duck yard” of the provincial city of Odense) and yet rose to become an internationally recognized writer and celebrity, feted by the royal houses of Europe. His tales and stories have been translated into every world language. The writer’s life story, embodied in the proverbial fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling” and idealized in his best-selling autobiography The Fairy Tale of My Life, is emblematic of the nineteenth-century’s favored rags to riches mythos. It is no wonder that tales such as “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” and “The Little Mermaid,” which empathetically render the painful experience of alterity (Andersen never shed his outsider status) and the rewards of suffering, still hold universal appeal for millions of readers. As Binding points out, Andersen’s ascent from the proletariat to the literary intelligentsia parallels Europe’s ascent to modernity and the Kingdom of Denmark’s transformation from an absolutist monarchy to a modern democracy. Indeed, Andersen serves as a sensitive and poetic witness to this remarkable century in five successful novels, in six eloquent travel books (he made twenty-nine foreign journeys), and, arguably, in many of his 156 tales and stories. In some of his later futuristic fairy tales, such as “In A Thousand Years’ Time” (originally published in 1852), in which Andersen prophetically depicts Americans touring Europe by “air-ship” in the next millennium, he anticipates advances in technology and transportation with wary skepticism. Paul Binding rightfully applauds Andersen’s “pre-modernist” sensibilities in this most recent study.

Thankfully, this study is not a literary biography adhering to a detailed chronology of Hans Christian Andersen’s well-documented life and literary career; the famous Dane was a prolific diarist and letter writer and, with constant view to posterity, composed his autobiography in three versions. The task of sorting fact from fiction has already occupied many generations of scholars, most of them Danish. Most recently, H. C. Andersen’s biography has been revisited by Jens Andersen (the surname is one of the most common in Denmark) in his two-volume Andersen—en biografi (2003); the present study has made use of the English translation of Jens Andersen’s work, Hans Christian Andersen—A New Life (2004). Binding’s new monograph focuses on Andersen’s prose contributions, particularly his novels, canonical tales, and travel books. Binding reads these texts in dialogue with a much wider European context—that is, in conversation with Andersen’s English, German, French, and Scandinavian literary antecedents, contemporaries, and descendants: the tales and novellas of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Adalbert von Chamisso, and Ludvig Tieck, as well as Goethe; the novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Walter Scott (much is made of Scott’s influence), as well as those of Balzac, Stendahl and Zola. Naturally, the wider Scandinavian context is also considered (Asbjørnsen and Moe’s Norwegian fairy tales, Henrik Ibsen’s early dramas, and Frederika Bremer’s Swedish novels), as well as the canonical literary and intellectual figures of the Danish Golden age (Adam Oehlenschläger, B. S. Ingemann, N. F. S. Grundtvig, and Søren Kierkegaard) and the Modern Breakthrough (Georg Brandes). Binding’s frame of reference is far ranging, even including Russian writers, such as Turgenev and Tolstoy.

Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness is structured according to a selection of Andersen’s major prose contributions. For example, a discussion of Andersen’s debut...