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Andersen was screaming in terror, ‘half-dead with fear’.
    His experience in a clothing mill was no better. His appearance was so effeminate that a group of his co-workers forced him to pull his trousers down in front of the rest of the workforce to see if he was a girl. Later, he signed up as a carpenter’s apprentice but, on his first day at work, the previous episode still fresh in his mind, he could do nothing but stand trembling, blushing and upset. The other apprentices noticed his distress and taunted him until he fled.
    Andersen wasn’t an unprepossessing young man. Clumsy, pin-headed and perpetually dreamy, he walked around with his eyes half-closed: people would ask his mother if he was blind. Even his walk was unintentionally comic; one contemporary described it as ‘a hopping along almost like a monkey’. This physical clumsiness meant he failed to fulfil the one dream that had sustained him since his early childhood: to become an actor. However, Jonas Collin, one of the directors of the Royal Theatre, took pity on him after his audition and offered to pay for him to return to school. The friendship with Collin and his family was one of the few relationships that Andersen managed to maintain through his life – but the return to school was a disaster. At the age of seventeen he was put in the lowest class with eleven-and twelve-year-olds, which, when added to his lanky frame and his dyslexia, made him an easy target for the sadistic bullying of the headmaster, who referred to him as an ‘overgrown lump’.

    Andersen emerged from this in worse shape than before. He was deeply neurotic, tormented by stress-induced toothaches, convinced his addiction to masturbation would lead to his penis falling off or send him mad. He was terrified of open spaces, of sailing, of being either burned or buried alive and of seeing a woman naked (the result of his experience at the asylum as a child). He was so embarrassed about his skinny, concave chest that he built it up by stuffing newspaper in his shirt.
    His love life was equally barren. Not one of his (usually gay) crushes was reciprocated. As his literary fame grew, he began to travel widely and struck up friendships with Mendelssohn and Dickens, and got to know Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Heinrich Heine. But rather like Heaviside there was something about Andersen’s manner that annoyed people. He could be both vain and ingratiating at the same time. After staying with his hero Dickens in 1857, his host stuck a card above the bed in the guest room saying: ‘Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks which seemed to the family AGES.’ Many think that the character of Uriah Heep was based on Andersen. Once he arrived unannounced to visit the other great contemporary master of the fairy tale, Jacob Grimm. Unfortunately, Grimm had never heard of Andersen and showed him the door.
    His forays around Europe meeting the rich and famous did not go down well at home, and he was often abused on the streets of Copenhagen with shouts of: ‘Look! There’s our orang-utan who’s so famous abroad!’ Even his closest friends, the Collin family, would call him ‘the show-off’, and it was said that there was no man in Denmark about whom so many jokes were told.
    Later in life, Andersen, rich but lonely, took to visiting brothels, paying the girls simply to talk to him. Like Newton andHeaviside, he died a virgin but bad luck pursued him even beyond the grave. The man he had loved in vain since childhood, Edvard, the married son of Jonas Collin, was originally buried with Andersen (along with his wife), as the writer had requested, but the family later changed its mind and moved them, leaving Andersen to face eternity much as he had lived – alone.
    In Denmark, Andersen’s ‘adult’ plays and novels are still read, but it is the fairy tales that have made him famous internationally. Translated into 150 languages, inspiring countless adaptations and still