The Fairy Tale and

7KH )DLU\ 7DOH DQG WKH 3HULRGLFDO +DQV &KULVWLDQ $QGHUVHQ૷V6FUDSERRNVJakob Stougaard-NielsenBook History, Volume 16, 2013, pp. 132-154 (Article)3XEOLVKHG E\ 7KH -RKQV +RSNLQV 8QLYHUVLW\ 3UHVVDOI: 10.1353/bh.2013.0003For additional information about this articleAccess provided by Sun Yat-Sen University (16 Mar 2015 12:30 GMT)/journals/bh/summary/v016/16.stougaard-nielsen.htmlThe Fairy T ale andthe PeriodicalHans Christian Andersen’s ScrapbooksJakob Stougaard-NielsenOn December 1, 1873, armed with tailor’s scissors, glue, and stacks of il-lustrated newspapers, Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) began his last major creative work of art: a big folding screen.1 From his Danish publisher Reitzel, the aging fairy-tale writer, novelist, poet, and playwright received engravings and English illustrated periodicals. The court photographer gave Andersen 150 photographs of famous Danish men and women, including photographs of Andersen himself. Other friends procured pictures from Germany, and the editor Delbanco offered Andersen a heap of issues of his Danish weekly illustrated news, Illustreret Tidende.2 With this extensive vi-sual archive of nineteenth-century art, popular culture, and historical events, he created eight thematic screens (dedicated to Germany-Austria, France, England, the Orient, Childhood, Danes, Denmark, and Sweden-Norway) in which portraits of famous personalities, landscapes, buildings, fable char-acters, and historical and social scenes comprise a vertical and overflowing topography of the author’s European and, at the same time, idiosyncratic worldview. The resulting folding screen is a collage of a turbulent Europe, cut and pasted from the modern mass media of illustrated periodicals, wood engravings, and photography, glued onto an Oriental piece of furniture.Although they were well-known, decorative, and practical pieces of fur-niture in Europe since the seventeenth century, traditional Chinese and Jap-anese screens were first popularized in Europe with the 1867 Paris World Exposition.3 The folding screen then became a fashionable commodity that enhanced interest in the decorative arts toward the end of the century. An-dersen, who had a lifelong passion for the decorative arts, and a curios-ity for technological wonders and the fashionable, visited the exhibition grounds in Paris on several occasions. He had also been provoked by a Danish journalist who claimed that only Charles Dickens could turn the exhibition into a story, to write what would become the tale “Dryaden: EnHans Christian Andersen’s Scrapbooks133 Fortælling fra Udstillingstiden i Paris 1867” (The Wood Nymph: A Tale from the 1867 Paris Exposition, 1868). In this tale (one of Andersen’s less-known modern tales), a wood nymph leaves the safety of her rural home to explore and eventually find her demise in the modern wonder of Paris. It is possible that Andersen found inspiration for creating his own folding screen while visiting the exhibition grounds in Paris. His screen includes two illustrations of the exposition’s spectacular aquarium (the “Orient” and the “Childhood” screens) most likely cut out of the pages of Illustreret Tidende. The illustration on the “Childhood” screen provides a backdrop for one of Vilhelm Pedersen’s illustrations for Andersen’s tale “Thumbelina.”4 In the folding screen, Andersen’s fairy-tale world is never separated from the visual spectacles of modernity, from the personalities or the architectural edifices that came to define his age in the pages of illustrated periodicals.The aesthetic potential of the folding screen was not an entirely new idea to Andersen. Although he never created other folding screens, he did refer to and describe such screens in his early poetry. Already in 1829, well before the publication of his first collection of fairy tales and his first novel in 1835, Andersen published a series of five poems in the newspaper Kjøbenhavns-Posten with the title “Skjærmbræts-Billeder 1–5” (Folding-Screen Pictures), and the following year he published the poem “Mosters Skjærmbræt” (Auntie’s Folding Screen) in which the poet describes a series of biblical scenes from recollection that decorated his aunt’s folding screen. Curiously, it seems Andersen’s career was framed by verbal and visual folding screens. In his early ekphrastic poems as in his own decorative folding screen, the inspiration and the materials came from the popular, visual culture of the day, and in words or images Andersen always tried to capture the fairy tale in available materials from popular culture.Writing to a friend in 1874 after three and a half months of obsessive work on the folding screen, Andersen reflected on his labors:I have had no thought of any creative writing; my onlyoccupation has been to make a screen. . . . I have tried to includea poetic idea or a historical representation in each section and onecould say that the whole effect is that of a great, variegated fairytale. I would, however, have preferred to commit such a tale topaper with pen and ink, rather than having merely cut out picturesand juxtaposed them to suit my train of thought.5Immobilized by deteriorating health, depressed by his inability to write, and well aware that, as he put it, “the final curtain was about to fall,” Andersen used the “cut out” and “juxtaposed pictures” as visual supplements to hisBook History134personal recollections, yet as a whole the screen still retained the “fairy tale effect” that had become his literary trademark.Andersen is here suggesting that the fairy tale is not reserved to the writ-ten medium alone and should certainly not be devoid of “historical” or personal representations. His late conception of the fairy tale, as expressed with the folding screen, is a genre capable of representing both “our time,” the modern and popular culture of the nineteenth century, as well as the folkloristic “once upon a time,” though he never used this folk-tale formula. And, as we gather from Andersen’s engagements with visual media and the popular illustrated press in his folding screen, the fairy tale is not limited by or detached from its own mediality, but became, particularly in the later nineteenth century, highly dependent upon a great variety of media and, not least, intermediality.6 Contrary to still prevalent conceptions of Andersen as exclusively a writer of fairy tales for children, whose timeless stories grew out of a rich oral folk tradition or his own quaint naïveté, I argue that many of his tales drew on and were conditioned by a great variety of contempo-rary print, visual, and mixed media. Andersen’s success as a writer was at least partly due to his ability to make use of and respond imaginatively to the interests and daily lives of a growing mass-reading public and the needs of an expanding and diversifying periodical press. With the folding screen reconsidered as Andersen’s final “visual poetics” for his modern fairy tale, seeing his last surrender to the “merely” visual, to scissors and glue, as something more suggestive than a mere “diversion” for the aging author who was unable to write, a view expressed, for instance, by Jackie Wull-schlager, we begin to see an interesting, sometimes calculated, sometimes coincidental feedback between Andersen’s tales, his author-figure, and the pages of periodicals such as illustrated newspapers.7Andersen’s reliance on the periodical press as a medium had a significant effect on his tales and provided a platform from which he could promote his authorship. Some of his tales were shaped to meet the interests of a periodical readership. His periodical tale “Gudfaders Billedbog” (Godfa-ther’s Picture Book, 1868), a “textual” picture book first published without illustrations in Illustreret Tidende, referred explicitly to the many private picture books Andersen made for the children of his close friends—picture books he also crafted with scissors, glue, and “a poetic idea” out of the scraps of nineteenth-century print culture. Andersen’s periodical tales—tales that were either written for periodicals or referred to the popular press in various ways—should be considered more fully to appreciate the impact of modern print culture on an author whose worldwide fame to a large extent depended on his impersonation of a folkloric storyteller.Hans Christian Andersen’s Scrapbooks135 Andersen’s folding screen was made possible by the abundant and wide circulation of quality illustrated newspapers throughout Europe. Through-out his career, Andersen’s literary fairy tales and his worldwide fame were more intricately tied to the periodical press and the material conditions for authorship and reading it involved than critics have been willing to accept.8 From 1835 to 1872 Andersen produced about sixty tales for the Danish market that were first printed in newspapers, weeklies, or almanacs.9 In some cases Andersen saw to it that his tales were printed first in English translation in order to preempt piracy and secure payments for his works in a time before international copyright agreements—even though, as Helle Porsdam has described the situation in England, his popularity meant that such publications would immediately be pirated.10 Erik Dal has noted that ten tales were first printed in American magazines, and Elias Bredsdorff maintains that a total of eighteen tales, two novels, one travel book, and the definitive edition of Andersen’s autobiography appeared in English before they appeared in Danish.11Andersen and his publishers used specialized and general interest periodi-cals to publicize major book projects such as Horace Scudder’s U.S. edition of Andersen’s works (1869–1871) but also to launch periodicals that wished to target a particular readership by adopting the “Andersen brand.”12 One of the many examples of the latter is to be found in the first Christmas is-sue of the Danish Illustreret Tidende in 1859. A portrait of the author is presented on the front page, illustrating a full-page article recounting the already well-known “fairy tale of Andersen’s life.” As the magazine put it, “if one were to ask the children, which Poet they would prefer to see a pic-ture of and occupy themselves with in this the festive season, chances are ten to one that the unanimous and jubilatory answer would be: Hans Christian Andersen.”13Apart from the numerous verbal and visual portraits of Andersen in the periodical press, reviews of his tales were also central in establishing his fame, though the early reception in the Danish press was divided and pre-dominantly negative.14 Possibly more significant to Andersen’s popularity abroad were the eulogies and portraits of the author telling the “fairy tale of his own life.” According to Caroline Sumpter, though Andersen “never tired of boasting of his reputation with the nobility, it was to Danish and British magazines, newspapers and reviews that he looked—quite obsessively—to secure his reputation.” One example offered by Sumpter is Andersen’s dis-covery in London in 1847 of his own portrait in Howitt’s Weekly Journal together with Mary Howitt’s eulogy, a publication he reported to a Danish friend with the words: “I am strangely happy! I cannot realise it. I am actu-Book History136ally famous, so much so as neither I myself or Denmark is aware of.”15 He would often send positive reviews and other evidence of his fame abroad to his friends and editors in Denmark with the hope that the good news would be reported in Danish magazines.16Andersen’s intuitive understanding of the importance of the popular pe-riodical press, even at a time when piracy made it practically impossible to receive royalties for translated works, accounts not only for his global suc-cess but also for particular features of tales published from the late 1840s onward. These include modern, realist, and presumably fragmentary tales such as “Vanddraaben” (The Drop of Water, 1847), “Dynd-Kongens Dat-ter” (The Marsh King’s Daughter, 1858), “Dryaden: et Eventyr fra Udstill-ingstiden i Paris 1867” (The Wood Nymph: A Tale from the 1867 Paris Ex-position, 1868), “Gudfaders Billedbog” (Godfather’s Picture Book, 1868), and “Den store Søslange. Et Nutids-Eventyr” (The Great Sea Serpent: A Modern Fairy Tale, 1871).While recent criticism has done much to revive Andersen as a modern if not modernist writer, some of his periodical tales and their modernity still challenge prevalent aesthetic notions of thematic and structural coherence expected of the literary fairy tale.17 Jørgen Dines Johansen has described An-dersen’s “The Wood Nymph” as a “split text”: a tale that does not succeed in integrating its journalistic reportage from modern-day Paris with its fairy-tale world. And while enthusiastic about Andersen’s “boldest experiment in storytelling” and the potentially interesting enigma of “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” Harold Bloom found its meaning, like its setting, “a bog”—it is an uneven and strange tale. According to Bloom, “its motto might be: I have made a heap of all that I could find: a delightfully absurd fusion of Egypt and Vikings, ostriches and storks, swans’ skins and inner swans, quagmire monarchs and what you will.”18 What to Harold Bloom is “de-lightfully absurd” about Andersen’s narrative heap of “found objects” is, in fact, very similar to the assemblage of verbal and visual genres and objects a nineteenth-century reader would expect to find in an issue of Illustreret Ti-dende or other popular periodicals—and, indeed, very similar to the variety of illustrations we find in his folding screen.An early issue of Illustreret Tidende from 1860, in which Andersen’s pa-triotic poem “Jylland mellem tvende Have” (Jutland between two seas) was printed for the first time, gives a sense of the eclectic range of topics and ob-jects that were included in its densely printed folio sheets. In this particular issue we find an obituary for a Danish actor illustrated with his portrait, a prospect of a quarter in Odense, a drawing of a sea snake above an article describing a neoclassical sculpture of Hercules and Hebe, an illustrationHans Christian Andersen’s Scrapbooks137 by Hogarth about the technique of perspective in drawing, illustrations of Parisian folklife, and an illustrated article praising an invention that makes it possible to open a gate while riding a horse.19“The Wood Nymph” and “The Marsh King’s Daughter” may be the tales that make most extensive use of the eclectic blend of genres, images, and topics we find in the weekly illustrated newspapers. However, Andersen’s periodical works also include simpler tales wherein the reader is presented with technological wonders, social scenes, and visual displays in the genre of the fairy tale. Most often such tales (for example, “The Great Sea Ser-pent”) were written specifically for the periodical press. In the unusual case of “Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne” (The Little Match Girl, 1846), the tale was commissioned by the editor of the almanac Dansk Folkekalender, who asked Andersen to write a story based on an illustration that had first appeared in Flinchs Almanak three years previously. Although it was not written for the periodical press at first, “A Drop of Water” is another short tale that blends a modern world into the fairy-tale genre and whose theme would have appealed to the interests of a periodical readership. In its play-ful cast of trolls, who use a looking glass to magnify a drop of ditchwater, we find one of Andersen’s more curious stories, blending folkloric charac-ters and a contemporary occupation with visual technologies, infusoria, and urban life. The creatures in the drop of water appear as city dwellers who violently tear at each other when a drop of witches’ blood is applied—if it wasn’t a magnified drop of ditchwater it was, the youngest of the trolls surmises, “some great city,” or, as it reads in the first Danish version, “Co-penhagen or another major city.” The tale was first published for Andersen’s British readers in A Christmas Greeting to My English Friends (1847) as a memento of his visit to London and Charles Dickens earlier that year. Jackie Wullschlager may be justified in claiming that the tale seems more obviously to reflect on his experiences in London, the metropolis “as a ruthless jun-gle,” than Copenhagen at midcentury.20 That the tale could possibly apply to several large metropolitan areas of the time is evident from the tale’s ap-pearance in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in 1851; here the drop of water seems to represent “Paris, or London, or some other large city.”21 While Andersen had rich opportunities to learn about the creatures that live in a drop of water from his scientist friends and contemporary science books, it was also a popular motif for xylographic prints in the first half of the nineteenth century. A full-page illustration, similar to what Andersen had suggested in his tale, appeared in Punch in 1850 with the title “The Wonders of a London Water Drop.” The city jungle represented in a drop of contaminated water from the Thames was a captivating and attention-Book History138grabbing illustration of the state of public sanitation and urban life at mid-century.22Andersen’s periodical tales were easily adaptable to new markets and for-mats. They addressed a contemporary periodical reader who would not find incongruous an assemblage of fairy-tale characters, technological wonders, urban caricatures, and historical and journalistic representations. An ap-preciation of the tales’ periodical context could account for not only the ex-perimental transformations of Andersen’s storytelling but also for his insist-ence on maintaining the fairy-tale genre throughout his career as one of the many possible genres with which to express “the new” and the sociocultural conditions of modernity. “Our time,” as the reporter/narrator proclaims in “The Wood Nymph,” “is the time of fairy tales.”23“Den store Søslange: Et Nutids-Eventyr” (The Great Sea Serpent: A Modern Fairy Tale) is, as the title suggests, a pertinent example of how Andersen sought to portray a modern experience for the periodical readers through the genre of the fairy tale. From the astounded and naive perspec-tive of the fish “below” the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, Andersen wished to represent “the new wonder,” the transatlantic telegraphic cable, which had invaded their world (as well as the world of humans) from “above.” Although Andersen had written the tale specifically for his American audi-ence, and had attempted to place it in advance of its Danish publication in Horace Scudder’s Scribner’s Monthly, it first appeared in Illustreret Tidende in December 1871 and not on the other side of the Atlantic until January 1872.24 What Andersen called one of his “better small tales” is an example of how contemporary inventions could provide rich material for the po-etic imagination.25 The story’s motif presumably first stirred his imagination on November 6, 1869, when he started writing two never-to-be-complet-ed tales responding to the much-publicized technological advances of that year: one about the telegraphic wire connecting Europe and Africa (“From Europe to Africa”) and another about the opening of the Suez Canal that same month (“A Stork’s Letter from Suez”).26 The following day Illustreret Tidende reported the completion of the canal, which the paper called the “third wonder” of “our time,” the first being the “telegraph cables lowered to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean” and the second “the giant railroad” in America between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. These wonders, accord-ing to the article, “reduce the distance between the nations thereby increas-ing the common wealth by an incalculable measure.”27 In Andersen’s tale, the telegraphic cable is the carrier of human thoughts in all languages and is referred to as a “wonder” of our time comparable to the great sea snake of Norse mythology, the Midgard’s Worm, which also encircled the lands andHans Christian Andersen’s Scrapbooks139 the oceans. The telegraphic cable is in both texts more than a technological advance. To both Andersen and the reporter for Illustreret Tidende, it is the carrier of a new cosmopolitan spirit, but in Andersen’s “modern fairy tale” the telegraphic cable is itself a materialization of a quasi-religious or mythological “above” (ovenfra) that will never cease to amaze the creatures “below.” Although the narrator insists on drawing a clear line between the sea creatures “below” and “we humans” above, the “most wonderful of wonders” cannot be grasped, even by the humans who laid it on the bot-tom of the sea, without the language of myth or legend. Andersen wrote the story from the perspective of the fish, revealing his own sympathy for “a view from below” by contemplating the wider significance of world-spanning telegraphy in the Shakespearean voice of the sea creatures: “What is that thing and what isn’t it? Yes, that was the question.”28 Andersen’s fairy tales of “our time” not only incorporated topics and genres drawn from the periodical press, they functioned as literary responses to the fast-paced mod-ernization of European metropolises by shifting perspectives back and forth between the past and the present, the “below” and the “above,” and allow-ing the periodical reader a space for reflective wonder and entertainment.Andersen sometimes fought in vain to place the translations of his mod-ern tales in periodicals with a fitting readership. Johan de Mylius has noted how Andersen, as early as 1839, failed to convince the editor of the Swed-ish children’s magazine Lekkamraten that the “The Little Mermaid” was really written for an older audience and would therefore better fit Läsebib-liotheket, a magazine for older readers.29 Similarly, in 1868 Andersen raised a concern with his American publisher, Horace Scudder, that the new tales and stories he was writing for the Riverside Magazine for Young People might not fit its readership:On a cursory perusal of the Riverside Magazine I must con-fess that it is my impression that the greater part of it is written forvery young people, and though I know that my tales are read byyoung and old, and that the former enjoy what I would call theexterior, the latter the inner part, I think that my stories are notentirely on their right place in the said Magazine.30The official critical canonization of Andersen in Denmark took place in the pages of Illustreret Tidende, where Georg Brandes, the Danish critic and champion of the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavia,31 published the first sustained critical judgment of Andersen’s fairy tales in three installments in 1869.32 His critique was instrumental in appropriating Andersen for aBook History140new generation as not only a Romantic but a timeless author, particularly by emphasizing Andersen’s wide readership, his “childish heart,” and his tales’ oral diction. According to Brandes, Andersen’s genius lay in his “uni-versal spirit,” his ability to encapsulate the “expansiveness of space and the permanence of time” in the fairy tale, as opposed to the temporary and the “fashionable” reflected, according to Brandes, in “newspaper articles” that “will only fulfil a city for eight days.”33 Brandes proceeds to make a contrast between the press and the oral tradition of the nursery: “Although in print, [Andersen] boldly insists on the oral expression. He wants to speak, and he wants to write in the manner of a school child if only he thereby avoids speaking as a book.”34 Brandes equates the universal child in Andersen’s ge-nius to the spiritual foundation of national European cultures. National cul-tures and Andersen’s tales are, according to Brandes, fundamentally derived from an oral folk culture, and only as such will they spread across borders. “The childlike is in its very nature derived from the folk, and its outward reach”—that is, its wide dissemination through modern print culture—“is linked to its reach below.”35While Andersen did rely on a rich oral tradition and constantly referred to his own humble origins in his autobiographies, he also captured the spirit of the modern. Andersen criticized Brandes for his failure to mention “The Wood Nymph,” “wherein the poetry of all things material in our time is extracted.”36 For Brandes, Andersen’s great contribution to literature was the universality and timelessness of his fairy tales, which ostensibly were not bound by their material embodiment on the page and were thus not suscep-tible to changing fashions or relevant only to a limited literary movement or cultural environment. Thus they could not, in Brandes’s logic, represent or express a modern experience.37 In the revised version of “Andersens Even-tyr” published in 1870, Brandes did finally mention, only to dismiss com-pletely, “The Wood Nymph”: “It will not do to have a fairy tale about a wood nymph separate her from her tree and allow her to make imaginary journeys to Paris, attend a ball at the Mabile etc.”38 Apart from Ander-sen’s betrayal of the national spirit of the folk by rooting his wood nymph in France, Brandes realized that Andersen appeared to be engaged in two mutually exclusive brandings of his own authorship: he insisted on being thoroughly ingrained in a local, oral, and timeless folk tradition while rep-resenting a time-bound modern experience.Early in his career Andersen advertised his fairy tales as derived directly from a national oral tradition he had heard as a child in Odense. He pref-aced a collection of his first three fairy-tale booklets with a note “To the older readers”:In my childhood I often listened to fairy tales and stories, many of these are still quite vivid in my recollection. Some seemto me truly Danish, as if derived directly from the folk; I have notin any foreigner found the same. I have told them in my own way,allowed for any transformation I found fitting. I have allowed theimagination to retouch the fading colours of the images. In thisfashion, these four fairy tales came about: “The Tinder Box,” “Lit-tle Claus and Big Claus,” “The Princess on the Pea” and “The Trav-elling Companion.”39In reality, Andersen’s reliance on oral folk culture was more a matter of branding than fact. His storytelling was from the beginning formed by the theater and his father’s reading aloud from a great variety of chapbooks. Near the end of his life, in the autobiographical poem “Odense” published in Illustreret Tidende, he emphasized the primary role of print culture rather than folk culture in the formation of himself as an author: “No, I was not a poor chap and neither was my father / he read fairy tales for me / so I be-came a storyteller.”40 From the beginning he drew on printed tales, novels, and poetical works in a variety of media. “Fyrtøjet” (The Tinder Box, 1835) was, according to Andersen’s note quoted above, inspired by folk tales he had heard as a child “in the spinning room and during the harvesting of the hops,” but it was also strongly influenced by his father’s reading from The Arabian Nights (first translated into Danish in 1757–1758) and the Dan-ish Romantic poet Adam Oehlenschläger’s poetic treatment of the Aladdin figure (Aladdin eller den Vidunderlige Lampe, 1805).41 Indeed, very few of Andersen’s 156 fairy tales and stories could be said to be directly inspired by folktales.42As a storyteller of tales for children, Andersen came to base his ambi-tions and eventual global success on a genre that in the nineteenth-century literary high culture was viewed as coming “from below”—as did he him-self, when he migrated from his poverty-stricken childhood home in Odense to Copenhagen at the age of fourteen. In well-known tales such as “Den grimme Ælling” (The Ugly Duckling, 1843) and in his no less than three autobiographies, Andersen presented his own rags-to-riches story wherein the son of a poor shoemaker ends up seated next to royalty at the high table of society. His life was, in his own presentation, a fairy tale, and there was a poetic justice in his choice of a minor genre to represent his social and artistic rise to fame.Andersen was an excellent promoter of himself and his work, and he was a practiced performer who tapped into the Romantic sensibility for。