It has long been my habit, when approaching a new biography, to read the account of the subject’s childhood first, then jump to the deathbed, before settling down to the main narrative between. It was rather disconcerting, therefore, to find that Paul Binding’s life of Hans Christian Andersen eschews the deathbed and ends with the author’s last, not very cheering, written words rather than his last breath:
The brewer is dead, Auntie is dead, the student is dead, him whose sparks of ideas ended up in the rubbish bin. Everything ends up in the rubbish bin.
It is only in the chronology that we learn that Andersen’s 70th birthday was internationally acclaimed and that his funeral a few weeks later was attended by the King of Denmark and a multitude of admirers.
The reason for this omission became clearer when I realised that this is a work of literary criticism rather than a biography and is the story of Andersen’s ideas and writings, although those were obviously closely related to the events of his life.
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