Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 25 - A-AUS.pdf/470

 424

ANDERLECHT — ANDERSON

Anderlecht, a town of Belgium, in the province to his pretensions. In June 1847 he paid his first visit to England, and enjoyed a triumphal social success; when he of Brabant, 3 miles W. of Brussels, with numerous left, Charles Dickens saw him off from Ramsgate Pier. manufactures. It was formerly a part of ^Brussels, but was erected into a separate commune in 1895. Population After this Andersen continued to publish much; he still desired to excel as a novelist and a dramatist, which he (communal) (1897), 41,862. could not do, and he still disdained the enchanting^ Fairy Andersen, Hans Christian (1805-1875), Tales, in the composition of which his unique genius lay. Danish poet and fabulist, born at Odense, in Funen, Nevertheless he continued to write them, and in 1847 and on the 2nd of April 1805. He was the son of a sickly 1848 two fresh volumes appeared. After a long silence young shoemaker of twenty-two, and his still younger Andersen published in 1857 another romance, To be or not wife : the whole family lived and slept in one little room. to be. In 1863, after a very interesting journey, he issued Andersen very early showed signs of imaginative tempera- one of the best of his travel-books, In Spain. His Fairy ment. which was fostered by the indulgence and super- Tales continued to appear, in instalments, until 1872, stition of his parents. In 1816 the shoemaker died, and when, at Christmas, the last stories were published. In the child was left entirely to his own devices. He ceased the spring of that year Andersen had an awkward accident, to go to school; he built himself a little toy-theatre, and falling out of bed and severely hurting himself. He was sat at home making clothes for his puppets, and reading never again quite well, but he lived till the 4th of August all the plays that he could borrow; among them were those 1875, when he died very peacefully in the house called (e. g.) of Holberg and Shakespeare. At Easter 1819 he was Rolighed, near Copenhagen. confirmed at the church of St. Kund, Odense, and began Anderson, the capital ot Madison county, Indiana, to turn his thoughts to the future. It was thought that U.S.A., situated on the west fork of White river; a manuhe was best fitted to be a tailor; but as nothing was facturing city, at the intersection of three railways. settled, and as Andersen wished to be an opera-singer, he Population (1900), 20,178. took matters into his own hand, and started for Copenhagen Anderson, the capital of Anderson county, South in September 1819. There he was taken for a lunatic, Carolina, U.S.A., situated in the western part of the state, snubbed at the theatres, and nearly reduced to starvation, and surrounded by a fertile region, largely devoted to the but he was befriended by the musicians Weyse and production of cotton, of which this is a shipping point. Siboni, and afterwards by the poet Guldberg. His voice It has three railways. Population (1900), 5498. failed, but he was admitted as a dancing pupil at the Royal Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett(1836 ), Theatre. He grew idle, and lost the favour of Guldberg, but a new patron appeared in the person of Jonas Collin, English medical practitioner, daughter of Newson Garrett, the director of the Royal Theatre, who became Andersen’s of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, was born in 1836, and educated at life-long friend. King Frederick YI. was interested in the home and at a private school. In 1860 she resolved to strange boy, and sent him for some years, free of charge, study medicine, an unheard-of thing for a woman in those to the great grammar-school at Slagelse. Before he started days, and one which was regarded by old-fashioned people for school he published his first volume, The Ghost at as almost indecent. Miss Garrett managed to obtain some Palnatoke's Grave, 1822. Andersen, a very backward and more or less irregular instruction at the Middlesex unwilling pupil, actually remained at Slagelse and at Hospital, London, but was refused admission as a full another school in Elsinore until 1827; these years, he student both there and at many other schools to which she says, were the darkest and bitterest in his life. Collin at applied. Finally she studied anatomy privately at the length consented to consider him educated, and Andersen London Hospital, and with some of the professors at St came to Copenhagen. In 1829 he made a considerable Andrews University, and at the Edinburgh Extra-Mural success with a fantastic volume entitled A Journey on Foot School. She had no less difficulty in gaining a qualifying from Holman’s Canal to the East Point of Amager, and he diploma to practise medicine. London University, the published in the same season a farce and a book of poems. Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, and many He thus suddenly came into request at the moment when other examining bodies, refused to admit her to their exhis friends had decided that no good thing would ever come aminations ; but in the end the Society of Apothecaries, out of his early eccentricity and vivacity. He made little London, allowed her to enter for the License of Apothefurther progress, however, until 1833, when he received a caries’ Hall, which she obtained in 1865. In 1866 she was small travelling stipend from the king, and made the first appointed general medical attendant to St Mary’s Dispensof his long European journeys. At Le Locle, in the Jura, ary, a London institution started to enable poor women to he wrote Agnate and the Merman] and in October 1834 obtain medical help from qualified practitioners of their he arrived in Rome. Early in 1835 Andersen’s novel, The own sex. The dispensary soon developed into the New Improvisatore, appeared, and achieved a real success; the Hospital for Women, and there she worked for over poet’s troubles were at an end at last. In the same year, 1835, twenty years. In 1870 she obtained the Paris degree of the earliest instalment of Andersen’s immortal Fairy Tales M.D. The same year she was elected to the first London (Eventyr) was published in Copenhagen. Other parts, School Board, at the head of the poll for Marylebone, and completing the first volume, appeared in 1836 and 1837. was also made one of the visiting physicians of the East The value of these stories was not at first perceived, and London Hospital for Children; but the duties of these two they sold slowly. Andersen was more successful for the positions she found to be incompatible with her principal time being with a novel, 0. T., and a volume of sketches, work, and she soon resigned them. In 18/1 she married In Sweden ; in 1837 he produced the best of his romances, Mr j. G. S. Anderson, a shipowner, but did not give up Only a Fiddler. He now turned his attention, with but practice. She worked steadily at the development of the ephemeral success, to the theatre, but was recalled to his New Hospital, and (from 1874) at the creation of a comtrue genius in the charming miscellanies of 1840 and plete School of Medicine in London for women. Both in1842, the Picture-Book without Pictures, and A Poet’s stitutions have since been handsomely and suitably housed Bazaar. Meanwhile the fame of his Fairy Tales had been and equipped, the New Hospital (in the Euston Road) steadily rising; a second series began in 1838, a third in being worked entirely by medical women, and the School 1845. Andersen was now celebrated throughout Europe, (in Hunter Street, W.C.) having over 200 students, most of although in Denmark itself there was still some resistance them preparing for the medical degree of Lon don University,