Hans Christian Andersen in England

In 1856, Hans Christian Andersen, paying his second visit to Britain, lodged at the Rochester home of his friend, Charles Dickens. The fabulist's stay, co-inciding with the disintegration of Dickens's marriage, was not a success. As unworldly as a faun gambolling across a minefield, Andersen appeared oblivious to the tensions that governed the mood of the household. Within hours of arriving, he had rendered himself obnoxious to Dickens's children by demanding that they attend his performance of a traditional Danish 'Thank-You Dance'. The execution of this elaborate ritual was complicated by the antics of Rupert, a young Spaniel, who tugged at Andersen's flailing leg. Dickens eventually removed the puppy from the room, but Andersen's irritation was evident to all. "His horse face grew even longer," noted Dickens's daughter, Kate, in her diary. "If he wanted to express his gratitude properly, he should have let us eat supper whle it was still hot instead of lingering over his beastly dance!"

Relations between Andersen and the Dickens children might have been repaired were it not for a co-incidental decline in Rupert's health. For the next three days the dog repined, on the fourth, it died: the grief stricken children were unanimous in blaming their visitor. "He fixed poor Rupert with his evil eye," wrote Kate, "as surely as if he had shot him." As the children buried the puppy in the grounds, Andersen could be seen watching from his window, his face, according to Kate, wreathed in "a complacent smirk." In fairness, it seems unlikely that she could have determined Andersen's facial  ..or even his identity) from the distance described, but less partial observers than the children noted Andersen's inability to adjust to the sombre mood of the house. Wilkie Collins referred to the unnerving "whoops of laughter" emanating from the Dane's room while Dickens's sister-in-law was alarmed to find him in her wardrobe.

As Dickens's marriage entered its death throes, he responded to the demands of his increasingly querulous house-guest with commendable restraint. Kate, on the other hand, listed his offences with an escalating hatred. "A. couldn't find his shoes and sat down to breakfast without them," she writes in one entry. "I was so disgusted by the sight of his bony feet that I had to excuse myself." Later in the week, she describes a game, initiated by Andersen, in which he feigned death and encouraged the children to cover him with petals. At the conclusion of this morbid charade, he leapt from his 'bier', crying, "I am alive!" and dancing triumphantly around the room. Five year old Edward, Dickens's youngest son, was so excited by the spectacle of their reviled guest's 'death' that he hatched a plot to have him thrown from an upstairs window. The children were light-heartedly discussing the plan in their play-room, when their proposed victim emerged from behind a curtain, tearfully denounced them as 'murderers' and fled to inform their father. "Poor Edward was horribly scolded," wrote Kate who bitterly resented the necessity of apologising to the eavesdropper.

Two weeks later, Andersen finally departed. Dickens celebrated by pinning a note to the door of his former bedroom on which he wrote, "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks which seemed to the family AGES!" For weeks, the family and household staff continued to find evidence of his tenure. Scrolls of obscurely inscribed sheets of paper and elaborately constructed dolls, fashioned out of twigs and grass, were hidden around the house and grounds. Dickens's friend, Walter Kemp, who had travelled in rural Denmark and suspected witch-craft, warned him that each doll represented a member of the house-hold and should be disposed of carefully. Dickens, at a loss, consigned them all to a bonfire, mercifully without any apparent ill-effect.

 

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