 Hello kids and welcome to Dapper History, a series that I'm starting where I'm going to tell you a bit about some of the interesting parts of history that you probably haven't heard before. And today, our first episode, I'm going to be telling you about Hans Christian Andersen and his terrible personal life. For those of you who aren't familiar with Hans Christian Andersen, you've definitely heard his works before. He wrote The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid, The Tin Soldier, a lot of his works have been adapted by Disney. Hans got on my radar a couple years ago when my mom picked these up from the thrift store. There are these old illustrated books of his stories from the like 60s or 70s. She got these because like their illustrations and art were really cute and cool and we decided to read them. And I want to preface this by saying that like, in my opinion, it's the coldest take in the world to be like, hey, you know those happy go lucky fairy tales we grew up with? Well, what if I were to tell you that the original stories weren't quite as family friendly? Oh my God, we all know they were written hundreds of years ago by Europeans. Of course, they're all fucked up about like eating children alive and stuff. But Hans's stories kind of took this in a different direction that really caught my eye. So my mom and I decided to read The Tin Soldier. If you're familiar with the story, it's likely that you've seen it in Fantasia. And Hans's original story is actually pretty similar to Fantasia. It's about a tin soldier who's missing a foot who falls in love with a ballerina doll. Evil Jack in the Box throws him out a window. He goes on an adventure, comes back home, gets the girl. It's very simple, right? Just for one minor detail, I'm quoting from the original story. This is how it ends after the tin soldier and the ballerina are reunited. Just then, one of the small boys, the boys who own the toys, grabbed the tin soldier and threw him, for no reason at all, into the stove. The book ends with the tin soldier and the ballerina burning to death. It's the same story. It just ends with them burning to death. What the hell? And as we kept reading through them, we noticed this pattern in a lot of his stories like tin soldier, romance that ends in tragedy, little mermaid, romance that ends in tragedy, the Snow Queen. The Snow Queen's pretty sick actually. I'm not going to lie. He even wrote a story called The Snowman, which is about a snowman who falls in love with a lit stove. Guess how that ends? So at this point, I'm just thinking, okay, who is this guy and what is his damage? Which led me to doing my favorite activity, which is looking someone up on Wikipedia and going straight to their personal life section. Hans was born in 1805 in Denmark and had a pretty standard childhood of getting abused and traumatized. He later in life found success as a poet and writer, and so he made a career out of that. He's described as being skinny, lanky, effeminate. I also found reports of multiple people referring to him as being gawky, which is a word that I will now be incorporating into my life daily. His personality was pretty much the same. He was very sensitive, very dramatic, kind of histrionic, kind of weird. He was a creative type. What can I say? When I was being seen, he was bad at it. I don't want to refer to him as an incel because I more so associate incels with like violent misogyny, you know? I don't think Hans hated women. I think he really just had zero game. He was a type to get a crush on a woman, write her a long ass poem about how their soulmates and then get like shocked and devastated when she decides to marry someone else. And he took his experience of getting repeatedly rejected and used that as inspiration for his children's stories. Here's where things get interesting. There's some evidence to indicate that Hans might have been a bisexual icon. There are some records of him writing like kind of tender letters to men. He had some kind of relationship with a famous male ballerina in which they were actually seen holding hands. Ooh. However, some historians speculate and I'm not saying I agree with this. I'm just telling you the fact that Hans wasn't actually attracted to men. He was just so desperate to find anyone to love him that he was willing to try being gay. And one way or another, whether that's true or not, oh my God. I don't know which one is more sad, being so down bad that you try to join a persecuted minority or being so down bad that future historians call you straight. I just realized that as a bisexual with a history of failed relationships, this is going to be how future historians talk about me, isn't it? This video isn't funny anymore. You want to know what the saddest part of all this is? There are no records that he was ever successfully in a relationship with anyone. Like, no met male female, he couldn't get anyone to love him. Luckily for us, Hans's inability to form human connections didn't just end in his romantic life. He also drove all his friends away because he's insane. Hey, editing Julia here. I don't know how I lost the clip of me explaining this, but basically Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Anderson used to be sort of acquainted. They met at a party and connected because they were both authors. Hans was a total fangirl and had zero boundaries. And so for years after this party, he wrote Charles like extensive letters. And then one day in 1857, Hans decided to surprise Charles by coming to his house and staying with him for two weeks, which to be fair wasn't uncommon back in those days since communication with friends was so difficult. It was pretty normal that sometimes your loved ones would like stay with you for a little bit. But this two-week visit, which I want to remind you, wasn't planned by Charles, turned into a five-week visit. There are just too many stories about what happened during these five weeks. And so I've compiled a list of some of my favorites. When he arrived, he asked one of Charles's children to shave his face for him because he either couldn't or wouldn't do it by himself. And because Charles isn't insane, he didn't make his kids do that. As a result, Charles had to schedule daily visits to the barber so that Hans could have his face shaved every day. At the time, Charles was involved with a play called Frozen Deep, and Hans showed up at the premiere. No clue if he was invited, but he was sure there. During the play, Hans started weeping loudly at one point, drawing attention to himself. And after the play, he was sulking because his presence at the event wasn't regarded highly enough, like as if it's his play or something. Hans grew up in the country and wasn't used to the city life where Charles lived. And he was like apparently really paranoid that the poor people in the city would pickpocket him and he just like talked about it a lot. Oh my goodness, do you think we're safe? Those children are looking at us funny. On the topic of him being paranoid, at one point, Hans took a taxi home and when the driver took an unfamiliar turn, he was immediately convinced that he was about to be robbed and murdered. So he put all of his valuables in his shoes and walked home getting blisters all over his feet. During his stay, he received a bad review on one of his works and so he laid down in Charles Dickens front lawn and just started screaming and crying. At a dinner party, Charles held out his arm for a woman because that's what they did back then. Hans took his arm and forced Charles to escort him into the dining room in front of all the guests. Charles was also associated with Wilkie Collins and at one point during his stay, Hans, I guess, was like around them and so he pulled an epic prank by making a daisy chain and putting it on Wilkie's hat without telling him. This resulted in Collins getting clowned on all around town for looking like an absolute dumbass. Hands down, my favorite detail about this visit is something that's actually kind of well-known about Hans is that he made paper cuttings and you can see these pictures online. They're not just little snowflakes, they're very elaborate art pieces and they're really cool actually. It takes a lot of skill. Unfortunately, he would do this at Charles' house and then just leave the crafting supplies and like the paper snips everywhere. This adult-ass man was literally a child who couldn't be bothered to clean up after himself. Reading these stories was so odd because Hans didn't grow up particularly wealthy and so it's just like, where did you get this level of arrogance where you think that everyone needs to wait on you hand and foot? Finally, after five weeks, Hans, I guess, left or was kicked out and sometime after that, he sort of put two and two together and realized that he was a walking cringe compilation and so he wrote Charles a letter. The letter read, please kindly forget the unfavorable aspect which our life together may have shown you of me. And Charles just never responded. There are reports that Charles had stuck a note to the door of the room where Hans had stayed during his visit that read, Hans Anderson slept here for five weeks which to the family felt ages. It's also sort of been speculated by historians and people who read books that Charles based the character Uriah Heap on Anderson. And if you don't know who this character is, please look up his personality because oh my God. Going into researching Hans, I remember being like, what is it about this guy? Like, why does he have zero friends? Why can he find no one to like him? And the more research I did, the more blatantly obvious it became that he is just unbearable to be around. Oh dear God, Hans wrote a story about Jewish people, specifically the tale called The Jewish Maiden which I shall summarize for you now. So the Jewish Maiden herself is this little girl named Sarah who goes to a Christian school and is very interested in Jesus and like wants to become a Christian. And eventually the school approaches her and her father and says, listen, this is a Christian school. You either have to convert to Christianity or you're gonna have to go somewhere else. And Sarah's father who is this evil Jewish asshole is like, you'll become a Christian over my dead body. And so she gets kicked out of the school and loses her education. The rest of the story is just her living this like miserable life and everything being horrible. And all the time she's just like, oh, I want to worship Jesus so bad. Oh, woe unto being Jewish. Like literally the plot is that being Jewish ruined her fucking life. And then she died young, great story, Hans. Hey, but guys, it's a happy ending because from the place where she is buried, you can hear the church hymns being sung. The end. Oh my God. I don't even know where to start with this one. Actually, I do. Let's start with the fact that Sarah, the character of a little girl, was based on a real life Jewish woman who Hans proposed to who rejected him. I wonder why on earth she wouldn't want to marry him. Oh, and one of the details about this rejection is that he promised her that because he's apparently loosely related to some royalty, if she married him, she would get to live in a castle to which I assume she replied, okay, that's not true. But even if that was true, I would literally rather die than marry you. Second of all, just, oh my God, this is so anti-Semitic. Doing research for this, I actually found this article that like pissed me off. It argued that, I mean, for the time that it was written anti-Semitism was very blatant and very generally accepted. And so this story was actually kind of pro-Semitic because it at least portrays the Jewish maiden in a positive way, like she's a good character. And to that, I say, okay, sure, she's a good character, but it portrays literally the entire faith of Judaism as being the worst thing in the world. Her life is ruined because she's Jewish. Like, that's the story. And I just want to say that I myself am not Jewish and so I'm not going to be speaking over Jewish people or speculating on what their experience is, but all I can say about this story is if you needed another reason to not fucking like this guy, here it is. In some bizarre practical joke from God, this man lived to be 70 years old. And of course, he left the world as he lived in it being a drama queen and inconveniencing everyone. It's believed that the official cause of his death was some form of liver cancer. But of course, since we're dealing with Hans here, it couldn't have been that simple. In 1872, three years before Hans's death, he fell out of bed and never recovered from those injuries. I'm not joking. Like when you look up how he died, every source that I found has mentioned him falling out of bed. God, I want to bully him so bad. So like, even though he actually died from a legit illness, he spent the last three years of his life toiling away in bed, suffering from the injuries of falling like what couldn't have been more than three feet. Hans was literally that kid back in grade school who would like, fake breaking his arm or fake being terminally ill just so he could get attention. My eulogy to Hans is, you're so lucky I never met you because I would have shoved you in a locker so bad. Amen. As we're wrapping up, I just want to acknowledge the fact that this video has just been however many minutes of me ruthlessly insulting this clearly mentally ill dead man and that that's kind of harsh and kind of mean and it's my third video on this channel and maybe I'm coming on a little too strong and to that I truly, from the bottom of my heart, say I can't help it, man. I don't know what to tell you. I can't help it. At this point of filming, I have spent days studying this man, specifically studying his personal life and personal interactions and I can truly say that he is just unbearable. He is unbearable. And I wanted to like him. I wanted to feel bad for him. I wanted to see him as some underdog mentally ill artist who no one understood Van Gogh or something but he's just so annoying. If I included every instance of him being a weirdo, being rude to people for no reason, harassing women for attention or some other just general like social faux pas, this video would be eight years long. I'm not joking. It's really famously well-known that he wrote the ugly duckling about himself. He's written all these stories about these tragic romances that could never be and this whole time as he was writing these, he never looked in the mirror while someone else shaved him and said, maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I'm the reason why I can't get a girlfriend or boyfriend, you know? I don't really know how to end the video after that. That's about all that we have time for today. If you have some interesting historical figures that you'd like to see me make a video on, I kind of want to make this a series because this is just really my thing of like getting in people's business, you know? Thank you so much for watching. I hope you have a good day. Subscribe if you want to. Don't if you don't. Um.