On your right, look for the low yellow-plastered house with a red-tile roof, small-paned windows, and two plain front doors pressed close to the street.
This is H. C. Andersen’s childhood home... and it is smaller than many people expect. The whole place covered about forty-two square meters, about the size of a modest studio apartment, yet in Andersen’s early years it held three apartments, and in eighteen oh nine the records counted six families here. That turns a “home” into a pressure cooker.
Hans Christian moved here in May of eighteen oh seven, when he was two, with his father Hans Andersen, a shoemaker, and his mother Anne Marie Andersdatter. In the next quarters lived the glove-maker’s apprentice Frantz Köcker and his family; at the other end, the hat-maker’s apprentice Phillip Schenk and his wife. The Andersens and the Köckers even shared an entrance hall, which is a polite architectural way of saying privacy was in very short supply.
So ask yourself... what kind of imagination grows when space, quiet, and certainty are all rationed?
Some of the answer begins in the kitchen. From there, a ladder led up to the loft, where a box of earth sat in the gutter with chives and parsley growing in it. That tiny scrap of green, balanced above cramped rooms, later fed Andersen’s imagination and found its way into the world of The Snow Queen. Even genius, it turns out, sometimes starts in a herb box.
But the hardship here was real. After Hans Andersen died in eighteen sixteen, young Hans Christian remembered lying on the floor trying to sleep while his father lay dead in the bed. Anne Marie later remarried a young shoemaker’s apprentice, Niels Jørgen Gundersen, but the family soon had to leave after the owner, Christian Huus, died and his widow sold the property.
The little house ahead of world fame was crowded, tense, grieving, and stubbornly alive. In about five minutes, we’ll step from these tight domestic rooms into the older silence of Grey Friars Monastery. If you want to come back inside later, the museum is closed on Mondays and usually opens from eleven AM to four PM the rest of the week.
