Contents introduction chapter I. A great children’s writer: H. Ch anderson

Conclusion on Chapter I
From a historical perspective, nineteenth-century Denmark was suspended between two worlds – that of superstition, folklore and the traditional archaic power of the monarchy on the one hand and that of scientific advancement, rational thinking and a budding democracy on the other (Grønbech, 1980:94). There were scientific inventions such as Oersted’s electromagnetism, yet many peasants were still living in a natural environment that they could not control and they continued to find answers to natural phenomena in the supernatural 10,94. Industries were being developed across Europe, leading to the appearance of a middle-class and yet many people still lived in abject poverty. And King Frederik was forced to implement a democratic system which undermined the privileges enjoyed by the nobility: he still held 7 monarchic power, but there were murmurings of dissatisfaction among the working classes who had discovered the power of the lower classes from the French revolution (Buch-Jepsen, 10,27. As a little boy growing up in Odense, Andersen found himself torn between these two worlds. On the one hand his imagination remained rooted in the superstitious peasant environment in which he grew up, thriving, as he had, on his grandmother’s tales, and on the other hand, he was inspired by the growth of democracy and the belief that a “self-made man” could improve his circumstances through his rational mind and an overturning of the social status quo (Popova, 2013:6-10). The social constraints of the past were being questioned which meant that even a peasant like Andersen could improve his social position if he used his talents – in his case, his incredible imagination. These possibilities paralleled the ideology espoused by the romantics half a century earlier: anyone could improve his/her circumstances by questioning the norm, employing their imagination, rather than relying solely on reason and by taking on the task of the outsider, the visionary who enlightens society. Although Andersen was a peasant, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman, his parents encouraged his dreams and imagination. He might have been expected to follow in the footsteps of his father and follow a trade, but his father, who owned books and read to him, encouraged him to develop his imagination. His mother, too, encouraged imaginative play, making him colorful costumes with strips of cloth so that he could act out plays he found on his father’s bookshelf. Andersen would also escape to the spinning room in the mental asylum where his grandmother worked and spend time listening to her tell tales. His family environment thus provided fertile ground for the development of his imagination and, ultimately, encouraged his romantic leanings. Andersen also lived through the birth of democracy in Denmark, encouraged by the promise of new industries developing both there and across Europe (Grønbech 1980:94). Although he was inspired by the influx of liberal thought and ideological innovation that followed the French Revolution, however, Andersen’s disillusionment with the unchanging conditions in Danish society urged him away from a rational approach to problems to the adoption of an imaginative one. He observed that while conditions did not change fundamentally for the Danish peasant 8 class, at least the imagination enabled people to think differently about circumstances and escape hardship in that manner. The imagination offered a liberating vision of a self-made man who could escape his class, relying on his inborn talents to achieve material and spiritual success. The fact that Andersen was an outsider also enabled him to see the flaws of society more clearly. He considered himself almost a romantic visionary, called to unmask these flaws and guide his fellow man to a more elevated understanding of being, to a spiritual dimension that could alleviate the suffering caused by the industrial revolution and its alienation of man from nature. Like the romantics, Andersen used his imagination to overcome the restrictions of his social position and created tales that defied the literary and social conventions of the day. Maria Popova describes this as the creative power of “positive constructive daydreaming” [8,170], a term that is better understood when read against the background of Bruno Bettelheim’s psychological theory on the imagination. Bettelheim asserts that the search for meaning remains central to human existence and one can best come to terms with the inexplicable, not through attempts at rational comprehension, but by spinning out daydreams- fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures” [9,7]. This is precisely the process that plays out in Andersen’s tales, a process that is intrinsically romantic.