In the Library
Andersen's Fairy Tales
Hans Christian Andersen, 1835
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 4 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 18
- Length
- Length 55k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Household Tales
Brothers Grimm
The Grimms published their tales a generation before Andersen began his, the old wolves, witches and wicked stepmothers of the folk tradition he reinvented with his own heartbreak.
£1.99
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Another writer who spoke to children without condescending to them, building a world just as strange and logical as Andersen's, if considerably less sad.
£1.99
About the book
A tin soldier with one leg falls from a windowsill into a gutter, sails out to sea in a paper boat, and is swallowed by a fish bought at market and brought home. Hans Christian Andersen, the cobbler's son from Odense who walked to Copenhagen at fourteen with nothing, began publishing these tales in 1835 and continued for nearly forty years, inventing the literary fairy tale as a form distinct from the folk tales the Grimms had collected. The little mermaid trades her voice for legs that walk on knives; the ugly duckling shivers through one winter; the emperor parades naked while a child speaks. Cruelty and tenderness sit on the page without apology. The stories know what children know and adults forget.