SOURCE: "Hans Christian Andersen—The Journey of His Life," in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol. 76, No. 3, Autumn, 1994, pp. 127-43.

In the following essay, Andersen (a twentieth-century critic) discusses the motif of travel in Andersen's works, finding it connected with themes of restlessness, homelessness, and alienation, and maintaining that the idea of travel can be seen as a metaphor for Andersen's own life journey.

Hans Christian Andersen's delight in travel is well-known, as is his talent for describing his progress through Europe and, briefly, the Near East and North Africa. His very earliest works, and his earliest successful works, were travel books or fiction inspired by the experience of travel in the middle of the nineteenth century. They show him integrating fact and fiction seamlessly, so that the reader comes to experience the world through his mind, with his sensitive eye for the significant...