"Hans Christian Andersen often referred to in Scandinavia as H. C. Andersen; (April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories—called eventyr, or "fairy-tales"—express themes that transcend age and nationality.
Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films." SOURCE
This bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen is at least double life-sized. He is depicted as sitting on a bench. He is seated flat on a bench, his legs somewhat parted, with both feet flat on the ground, toes barely over the edge of the plinth. He is dressed in fine period clothes, including a top hat and a long top coat that is draped over the bench. He is wearing a dress shirt and vest, with a scarf around his neck, slacks, and dress shoes. In his left hand he holds a walking stick that he holds at a slight angle, resting on the ground between his legs. In has right hand he holds a book, resting on his right leg, with a finger holding a specific page with the book closed around it. He is looking directly to the left, with his head tilted slightly upward. While much of the statue is oxidized, you can tell he is a favorite for seated pictures on his left knee as it is nicely polished. In fact, there were a number of people waiting their turn to sit on his knee while I was there. He is sitting atop a bronze bench which is attached to a bronze plinth below. The bronze plinth stands about a foot high, and is itself, atop a wider, but shorter, stone base. Attached to the base is a bronze marker, which reads:
DIGTEREN
H.C. ANDERSEN
1805 - 1875
AF HENRY LUCKOW-NIELSEN
1902 - 1992
OPSTILLET 1961
KØBENHAVNS KOMMUNE
Most of this is easy to translate, however, In English, this marker would read:
POET
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
1805 - 1875
BY HENRY LUCKOW-NIELSEN
1902 - 1992
SET 1961
COPENHAGEN MUNICIPALITY
"Hans Christian Andersen was a product of two towns, two social environments, two worlds and two ages. Both as a man and as a writer he thus continually developed and changed, but was also in constant dialogue with himself and even at times at war with himself. Thus his social rise provides the direct and indirect motif in many of his tales, novels and plays, both as a productive source in his search for a new and more comprehensive identity and as a source of perpetual and unresolved traumas.
Two Towns
The two towns which had such a decisive influence on him were his native town of Odense, and Copenhagen, where he lived and worked for the greater part of his adult life.
As a poor child in the small but self-satisfied provincial centre of Odense, Andersen received throughout the first 14 years of his life impressions and experiences that were to be decisive for his literary production. In the autobiography of his youth, Levnedsbogen (not published till 1926), Andersen emphasised that the way of life in Odense had preserved popular old customs and superstitions unknown in Copenhagen and therefore available to him as a colourful stimulus to his imagination. However, even more decisive were the disturbing social experiences from the lowest ranks of society and his own urge to cast off the trammels of poverty, break with his social inheritance and realise his potential in the only outlet the times provided, the world of art, an urge that became ever more dominant throughout his childhood.
Furthermore, the elderly female inmates at Odense Hospital (the workhouse) told him the folk-tales that were later to provide a starting-point for his paraphrases of the old stories and for the tales he created himself. In this respect Andersen also stands between two worlds: the popular old oral narrative tradition and the modern world with its culture of books and focus on the role of the author.
A decisive factor that determined the direction of Hans Christian Andersen's life and his fantastic flight to Copenhagen in 1819, with the social and literary rise that followed, is the fact that, as the only town outside the capital, Odense had a theatre. In addition to his early escape into the world of reading (his father, the poor shoemaker Hans Andersen, owned books, among them the Bible, Holberg's comedies and the Arabian Nights) there was contact with the theatre (including the chance to see travelling players from the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen) to provide knowledge and direction to Andersen's dreams and aspirations. He left home as a 14-year-old 4 September 1819, a few months after his confirmation, to seek his fortune at the theatre in Copenhagen. Although this venture was unsuccessful, Andersen was tied to the theatre for the rest of his life, as the author of numerous plays and as the translator and adapter of foreign plays. The theatre became his fate, so it can truly be said that if he had been born in any other Danish provincial town, his career would never have been the same.
During Andersen's first years in Copenhagen (1819-22), he fought desperately to gain a foothold in the theatre as a ballet-dancer, actor or singer. Finally, when none of these attempts succeeded, he tried his hand as a playwright; this was also in vain, but resulted in the director's deciding to send him to school so that something proper might be made of him, and this experience was thus as decisive for his later life and work as the Odense years. In Copenhagen he gained access to two families - the Collins and the Wulffs - who were to become his spiritual kin. Here, too, he came to know both the bourgeois upper class of the capital and the very lowest stratum of its proletariat. He came to know the fight for survival at subsistence level and the bitterness of being a supplicant dependent on the good will of others.
Having left Odense and opted for art, Andersen had only one option: to get up and get on. However, this was exactly the point at which he experienced the suffering and humiliation that follow from leaving one world without having quite been accepted by another and higher one, an experience shared by the Little Mermaid (1837) and the protagonists in Andersen's novel O.T. (1836) and his play The Mulatto (1840).
Nevertheless, after his school years in Slagelse and Elsinore, Copenhagen also came to mean something positive in his development: here the proletarian Andersen acquired the culture and education associated with bourgeois circles in the Golden Age that encompassed the last years of absolute monarchy, and Andersen, fundamentally sensitive and sentimental, learned to use the light and ironic Copenhagen wit, particularly the lethal form he knew from the Collin family and from the dominant circle around the dramatist and critic Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Andersen's entire production of tales is, as it were, suspended between these two poles, heart and wit, sensitivity and irony, nature and culture, creating a field of tension that finds its expression as early as in his tour de force, Fodreise fra Holmens Canal til Østpynten af Amager i Aarene 1828 og 1829 (A journey on foot from Holmens Canal to the east point of Amager in the years 1828 and 1829), his first work, which was published in 1829.
Two Ages
With his rise from the bottom of society to the top, Andersen gradually came to be a regular guest at Danish and foreign manor houses and at the residences of kings and princes in Denmark and abroad. Thus Andersen's life became a paradigm for the social mobility that was only really brought about by bourgeois democracy following the signing of the constitution in 1849. Andersen's life and work are firmly rooted in the culture of the last years of absolute monarchy, but as a social outsider, one who had had to acquire the ideas inherent in the culture of the times, he became more modern and progressive in his ideas than the majority of contemporary Danish writers. He had every reason to reject the worship by the Romantics of the past as "the glorious peak, from which we have fallen, but now again seek" (Adam Oehlenschläger), and instead to place all his hopes on future developments. Throughout his oeuvre Andersen put his trust in a movement in the direction of increased humanity and enlightenment (see, for example, chapters VI and IX in his travel book Rambles in the Romantic Regions of the Hartz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, &c. (1831) and his story "Godfather's Picture Book" (1868)), just as he enthusiastically learned to profit from the revolution with respect to the means of travel (see his ode to the railway in the eponymous chapter in his travel book A Poet's Bazaar (Danish ed. 1842)), communication (the telegraph, which he thought would turn the world into "a single spiritual state", just as we envisage the Internet doing today) and industry (see his article "Silkeborg" (1853)). This article, like the stories "The Ice Maiden" (1862) and "The Dryad" (1868), reveals that sometimes he could view developments more pessimistically. Particularly because everywhere in his work, he appears as a spokesman of "nature" as the great measure of value, particularly in his perception of art and literature (see tales like "The Nightingale" (1843), and "The Bell" (1845).
From a literary as well as a mental and political point of view Andersen thus spans two cultures, two ages, two social systems and two literary periods (Romanticism and the dawn of Realism).
Fame
Andersen's literary fame grew rapidly from the mid-1830's, when his novels enjoyed widespread circulation in Germany. From 1839 onwards it was the fairy-tales that created his quite exceptional reputation in that country. It is from the mid-1840's that we date the great breakthrough in England and America for both tales and novels." SOURCE
"Henry Luckow-Nielsen, 1902-1992, Danish sculptor, trained as a carver and the Academy of Art 1923-30. In clay, stone and bronze have Luckow-Nielsen conducted naturalistic sculptures, particularly of women. They are set in several Danish cities, including Copenhagen, where his famous statue of Hans Christian Andersen (1961) stands at the town hall. As a teacher at Frederiksberg Technical School in 1931, he has taught many Danish artists, he received Eckersbergs Medal 1960." SOURCE