Hans Christian Andersen was a tall, awkward, ambitious boy from a one-room cottage in Odense who decided at fourteen that he would be famous, walked to Copenhagen with a few coins, and was. The fairy tales that made him, more than 150 of them, are unlike anything before them because he made them up, and unlike most of what came after because he never hid how much of himself was inside. This guide tells his life through six of the stories on this site, so that when you read from the Andersen collection you can hear the man behind the tale, and it ends with which of his endings to read tonight and which to save.

The Tinderbox: the shoemaker's boy, 1805–1819

Andersen was born on 2 April 1805 in Odense, on the Danish island of Funen. His father, Hans, was a shoemaker who read him The Arabian Nights and built him a puppet theatre; his mother, Anne Marie, was a washerwoman who could not read at all. The father died in 1816, after a spell as a soldier in Napoleon's wars, and the boy was left to a superstitious mother, a grandmother who told him folk tales, and a town that thought him strange. He was strange: he sang in a high voice to anyone who would listen, sewed clothes for his puppets, and refused the factory work he was sent to.

When he came to write his first fairy tales in 1835, the first he put on paper was The Tinderbox, a folk story he had heard in Odense about a soldier, a witch and three dogs with eyes as big as teacups, mill wheels and round towers. It is the least Andersen-like of his tales: brisk, amoral and cheerful. The soldier gets the princess and nobody learns a lesson. But the poor boy who becomes king by his wits is where Andersen started, and he knew it.

The Ugly Duckling: Copenhagen, 1819–1828

In September 1819 the fourteen-year-old arrived in Copenhagen intending to join the Royal Theatre as a singer, dancer or actor. He was none of these. He was, however, impossible to ignore, and after three years of being laughed at and fed by kind strangers he was taken up by Jonas Collin, a director of the theatre, who persuaded the King to pay for his schooling. That schooling, at Slagelse under a headmaster named Meisling who bullied him relentlessly, was the unhappiest period of his life, and he was twenty-two before he passed the university entrance exam.

All of that is in The Ugly Duckling, published in 1843 when he was famous and could afford to look back. The hen and the cat who cannot understand why he wants to float, the farmyard that pecks him for being different, the winter alone on the ice, and then the moment he bows his head expecting to be killed and sees his own reflection: Andersen called his autobiography The Fairy Tale of My Life, and this is its plot. The line to slow down on when you read it aloud is the last one but one: it does not matter about being born in a duck-yard, as long as you are hatched from a swan's egg. It is not a modest sentence, but it is a true one for a good many children.

The Princess and the Pea and Little Ida's Flowers: the first booklet, 1835

Andersen's first success was a novel, The Improvisatore, published in April 1835. A month later, almost as an afterthought, he issued a sixty-page pamphlet called Eventyr, fortalte for Børn, Fairy Tales Told for Children. It held four stories: The Tinderbox, Little Claus and Big Claus, The Princess and the Pea and Little Ida's Flowers. Two were folk tales retold; the third was a folk tale in a page; the fourth was entirely his own, a story of a little girl who is told by a student that her flowers are tired because they have been dancing all night. It has no moral, no villain and hardly a plot, and it is the first true Andersen story: a child's fancy taken completely seriously by an adult.

The critics were unimpressed. One told him the tales were undignified and that he should stop. A second booklet appeared in December 1835 with Thumbelina, and Andersen went on producing them, in most years of his life, until 1872. The phrase 'told for children' was dropped from the title in 1843; he had realised the adults were listening.

The Little Mermaid: what he wanted and did not get, 1837

Andersen never married. He fell in love several times, with Riborg Voigt, with Louise Collin, his patron's daughter, and famously with the singer Jenny Lind, and was gently refused each time. He also formed intense attachments to young men that were, as far as anyone knows, unreturned. Whatever the truth of his private life, the shape of it was longing without possession, and that shape is The Little Mermaid, written in 1837. She gives up her voice for legs that hurt at every step, wins nothing, and refuses to buy her life back with the prince's. Andersen was proud that he had not simply killed her; he gave her a soul to earn instead. It is the saddest of the great tales and the one children most often ask to hear again, which tells you something about children.

The Nightingale (1843) is the other side of the same coin. It was written in the weeks after he first heard Jenny Lind sing, and the plain grey bird whose real song puts the jewelled clockwork one to shame is his compliment to her and his argument for himself: the real thing, however unfashionable, is what the Emperor needs when Death sits on his chest.

The Little Match Girl and The Fir Tree: the price of looking back, 1844–1845

By the mid-1840s Andersen was celebrated across Europe, welcomed in the houses of dukes, and the friend of Dickens, whom he met in London in 1847 and later visited for five weeks that Dickens's family found rather long. Success did not make him happy, and the tales of these years are his darkest. The Fir Tree (1844) is about a tree that cannot enjoy the forest for wishing to be grown, cannot enjoy Christmas for wishing to know what comes next, and ends in the attic telling its story to mice. Andersen was that tree and knew it.

The Little Match Girl, published in December 1845, was written to accompany a picture he had been sent, and it draws on his mother, who had been sent out to beg as a child and had hidden under a bridge rather than go home empty-handed. The girl strikes her matches one by one and sees a stove, a goose, a Christmas tree, and her grandmother, and in the morning she is found dead with a smile. Parents are often unsure whether to read it. The hardship theme on this site exists because children are not as fragile as we fear, and this story, read gently and followed by a cuddle, is the one that most often produces a child who wants to give something away. It is not a story for a child who is already sad tonight. It is a story for a January afternoon.

The Snow Queen: what he believed, 1844

If one tale holds everything Andersen thought, it is The Snow Queen, published in December 1844 and the longest thing he wrote for children. Kai gets a splinter of the devil's mirror in his eye and his heart, and everything good looks ugly to him; Gerda, who is ordinary, walks to the top of the world to fetch him back. Her weapons are a red pair of shoes, a robber girl's reindeer, the Lord's Prayer, and stubbornness. The cold, clever palace where Kai sits trying to spell the word 'eternity' out of ice is Andersen's picture of a world that runs on reason alone, and Gerda's warm tears are his answer. It is also, at bedtime, a story that breaks naturally into chapters, one for each of its seven parts, and the story-book reader on the page does exactly that.

Andersen at bedtime: the sad endings

Parents new to Andersen tend to make one of two mistakes: they either avoid him because the endings are sad, or they read the sad ones without warning to a child who is not ready. Here is a fairer sorting.

What unites all of them is the theme this site files under belonging: a small creature who does not fit, and who either finds the place it fits or is loved anyway. That is why Andersen, of all the fairy-tale writers, is the one children over eight come back to. He is not telling them how the world works. He is telling them he was odd too.

Tonight

If your child has never heard Andersen, read The Ugly Duckling and stop after the swans. If they know it, try The Princess and the Pea for a laugh or Thumbelina for a journey. For an older child, start The Snow Queen and read one part a night for a week. The Andersen collection gathers all the retellings; the history of fairy tales shows where he sits between the Grimms, who collected, and the Victorians, who followed his lead and invented.