Those of us at colleges and universities in the United States who teach and publish on the works of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) are sometimes asked by well-meaning colleagues why we devote our valuable research time to the works of a "children's fairy-tale author." This narrow perception of Andersen is so widespread that even when we explain that the Danish author also produced novels, dramas, poems, autobiographies, and travel books, and that the so-called fairy tales account for only a relatively small portion of his total literary output, the response is often bemused skepticism. Herbert Rowland's More than Meets the Eye will not only completely amend this misconception of Andersen's American literary legacy, but it at least provides ample evidence to the contrary in a well-written and well-researched study that explains how and when this limited view of Anderson arose in the United States.
Rowland states in his preface that his goal is "to trace and explain the course of American Andersen criticism from its rise in 1845 to its decline upon Andersen's death in 1875" (7). His book, addressed to "Scandinavianists and Americanists" (17), speaks meaningfully to both intended audiences. Rowland's task, however, cannot have been an easy one, a point to which he alludes at the very beginning of More than Meets the Eye. Many of the thousands of periodicals (both magazines and newspapers) that were published in the United States in the nineteenth century are now all but inaccessible (12). For this reason, the current study must necessarily be seen as a preliminary one. Rowland cautions that many reviews and references to Andersen and his works may in fact remain to be discovered (13).
Rowland begins his study by summarizing the number of English translations of Andersen's works that were available to American readers in the third quarter of the nineteenth century and asserts that because of the availability of the translations Andersen had already become "a cultural possession of Americans" (12). According to Rowland there were three separate "waves" in the American critical reception of Andersen, and not all genres received equal critical treatment by the reviewers (15). Andersen's autobiography received the most attention, but the collected tales were given almost as much critical notice. Andersen's travel books and his novels (especially - to use their English titles - The Improvisatore and Only a Fiddler) follow in that order. Andersen's stage works and poems, however, were accorded virtually no critical attention on this side of the Atlantic (largely because they had not been translated into English). Interestingly, Andersen received the greatest amount of critical notice late in his life (19-20). Perhaps surprisingly, given the great popularity of the tales and the stories by that time, it was the novels and autobiography, not his tales, that were most often reviewed during Andersen's later years (20).
There was some imbalance in the attention that Andersen's tales and stories received from American critics. Rowland calcualtes that forty (or approximately one quarter) of Andersen's fairy tales and stories were not reviewed in nineteenth-century American periodical literature. Among those not discussed were some of Andersen's most "realistic" stories, a fact that leads Rowland to speculate that "a lack of familiarity with these stories would have drastically reduced awareness of Andersen's trend toward greater realism from the mid-1850s on and reinforced his image as a romantic writer of fairy tales for children" (25). If more American commentators had been aware of Andersen's more realistic stories, Rowland surmises, they might have avoided the stereotype of Andersen as the writer of tales for children (26-27). This is a somewhat debatable postulate inasmuch as this stereotype prevails around the world, even to a certain extent in Andersen's native Denmark.
The list of periodicals in which reviews of Andersen's works are found totals an impressive thirty (especially in light of the fact that such publications were very much less widespread a century and a half ago than they are today). Some of these periodicals are still with us, such as the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times, but most have long since disappeared: Sartain's Union Magazine, Potter's American Monthly, the Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany, and Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, to name only a few (27). The periodicals themselves are a very diverse lot and were intended for different audiences, attesting to the universal appeal of Andersen in mid-nineteenth-century America. Likewise, the reviewers range from a few reasonably well-known names in American literature and culture, including William Dean Howells, Horace E. Scudder, and Charles A. Dana, to many now obscure, if not altogether forgotten, figures such as Edmund Clarence Stedman, Charles Godfrey Leland, John Esten Cooke, and Hjalmar H. Boyesen.
Overall, most nineteenth-century American reviewers, while conceding Andersen's preeminence as a writer of tales and stories (for children), nonetheless clearly recognized the complete artist and treated him as a serious writer (for adults) who, among other things, addressed himself to social issues and penned numerous realistic descriptive works. One of the many perceptive observations is to be found in Howell's critique of Andersen's third novel, Only a Fiddler: "Herr Andersen's hero, as far as we have made his acquaintance, is likely in each of the author's works to be an unworldly-minded, innocent-hearted youth, placed at odds with mankind by a blot upon his birth, or by the possession of genius - which is, perhaps, the worst sort of illegitimacy" (42). Nor was the occasional American commentator at all shy about using Andersen's works to buttress his own political convictions. Rowland succinctly characterizes the tenor of a review by an anonymous 1847 writer on Andersen's autobiography: "In the context of the times, and as described here, the course of Andersen's life assumes distinctly Jacksonian, if not (pre) socialist overtones" (64-65). In several of the reviews one also gets a good sense of how much the American intelligentsia of the nineteenth century knew about Scandinavian culture. In his 1847 observations on Andersen's autobiography, Charles Fenno Hoffmann, for instance, also shows an awareness of the Swedish authors Esias Tegner and Frederike Bremer, the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, and the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, all contemporaries of (and several known personally by) Andersen (59).
There is a wealth of information in Rowland's study about how much the nineteenth-century American literary establishment knew about, and appreciated, Andersen as a writer. If there is any criticism to be made of More than Meets the Eye, it is that the volume is neither sufficiently long nor detailed enough to satisfy completely the needs of either the Scandinavianist or the Americanist. Because of the inaccessibility of these periodicals, as well as the brevity of the passages cited, both groups would have benefitted from more copious citations from several of the reviews (notably those of William Dean Howells, Hjalmar H. Boyesen, and, of course, Horace Scudder). Perhaps Rowland might at some point be prevailed upon to publish an annotated edition of at least the most important of the reviews of Andersen's oeuvre to have appeared in American periodical literature in the nineteenth century.
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