2nd April: Hans Christian Anderson

Hans Christian Anderson was born in the town of Odense, Denmark, on 2 April 1805. 10 things you didn't know about Hans Christian Anderson.

1. He hated school. He was dyslexic and never able to spell properly; the schoolmasters believed that abusing the pupils strengthened their character, and the young Anderson was discouraged from writing. Hardly surprising then, that he considered his school days "the darkest and most bitter" of his life.
2. However, his dyslexia may have contributed to his success, because it meant his writing style was more like the spoken word. His publishers corrected the spelling mistakes but didn't mess with the style.
3. Before becoming a writer, Anderson trained as a weaver, and as a tailor. When he was 14, he had an excellent singing voice, and went to Copenhagen to find work as an actor. He was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but when his voice changed his budding career in showbiz came to an abrupt end. A colleague at the theatre said that he considered Andersen a poet. Taking the suggestion seriously, Andersen began to focus on writing.
4. One of the first fairy tales he wrote was called The Tallow Candle and was written while he was still at school. It was about a candle who didn't feel appreciated. The story was given to one of his benefactors where it was lost among the family papers until it was re-discovered in 2012.
5. His first published story was The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave, in 1822.
6. Although famous now for his fairy tales, during his early life his biggest successes were travelogues. The King of Denmark gave him a small grant for travelling and Anderson's travel journals were published to wide acclaim. He visited Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal.
7. The highlight of his trip to England was meeting Charles Dickens at a party. Anderson wrote of this,"We had come to the veranda, I was so happy to see and speak to England's now living writer, whom I love the most." The two writers got on well at first and Anderson returned to England ten years later to visit Dickens. However, it all turned sour, possibly because Anderson stayed for five weeks and had to be asked to leave, after which Dickens stopped writing to Anderson. Anderson never quite figured out why.
8. Unrequited love was a feature of Anderson's life. He often fell for unattainable women. One of them was the singer Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale". He wrote a story about her, The Nightingale, which is how she got the nickname. Anderson proposed marriage to her but she saw him as a brother. As a young man, he was in love with a girl called Riborg Voigt, and he was wearing a pouch containing a letter from her when he died.
9. Shortly before his death, he consulted a composer about the music for his funeral, saying: "Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps."
10. Andersen's birthday, 2 April, is celebrated as International Children's Book Day.