Hans Christian Andersen ruined his friendship with Charles Dickens by overstaying his welcome.

Famous Figures

F amed British novelist Charles Dickens and Danish fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen (known for The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid) could have been lifelong friends. They met in 1847 at a swanky party; Andersen told Dickens he was "the greatest writer of our time," and Dickens, in turn, sent Andersen several books he signed as "his friend and admirer." The pair were close pen pals for the next decade, but their relationship quickly went south in 1857, when Andersen visited Dickens for what was supposed to be two weeks, but stretched on for five.

Dickens later wrote in a letter to his friend William Jerdan — one of multiple letters to multiple people complaining about the visit — that "whenever [Andersen] got to London, he got into wild entanglements of cabs and sherry, and never seemed to get out of them agin until he came back here, and cut out paper into all sorts of patterns and gathered the strangest little nosegays in the woods."

While Andersen, who was notoriously difficult to be around, remembers the visit fondly, for the Dickens family it was both peculiar and exhausting. Andersen was moody, anxious, and sensitive to rejection. Dickens' daughter Katey called Andersen a "bony bore," and one morning, Dickens' wife Catherine found the visitor facedown on the lawn crying and clutching a bad review of his most recent book. After Andersen's departure, Dickens left a note on the mirror in the guest room: "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES." In the following years, Andersen continued to write letters to Dickens, but Dickens stopped responding.

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By the Numbers

Stories published by Hans Christian Andersen in his lifetime

156

Selling price of Andersen's signed copy of the Dickens novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

$122,500

Did you know?

Hans Christian Andersen always traveled with an escape rope.

Despite frequent journeys all over the world, Hans Christian Andersen was an anxious traveler. He was scared of dying in a hotel fire, so he always packed a long rope in his luggage as a precaution. This wasn't his only unusual phobia — the Danish author was so scared of being accidentally buried alive that he would sometimes place a note on his bedside table with the words, "I'm not really dead."

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