TLS on Dickens and Andersen

on Andersen

"In French or Italian, he was Peter the Wild Boy - in English, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum", Dickens wrote to his friend William Jerdin, the journalist and editor of the Literary Gazette, in July 1857, just after Hans Christian Andersen, a guest who had overstayed his welcome, finally took his leave.
Dickens and Andersen had met ten years before, and Dickens had warmly invited him to Gad's Hill: "I love and esteem you more than I could tell you on as much paper as would pave the whole road from here to Copenhagen". When he left, Dickens pinned a single piece of paper to the door of Andersen's vacated room. "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks - which seemed to the family AGES."
Andersen, speaking almost no English, had arrived to find Dickens distracted, exhausted after finishing Little Dorrit, in mourning and busy raising money for the widow of his late friend, the writer Douglas Jerrold. In the dark, later, as to why Dickens never replied to his many letters, Andersen remained fond of Dickens for the rest of his life and wrote warmly about this visit; his glowing terms, and especially his generous vision of Dickens's wife, Catherine, and of their marriage, slyly published in Bentley's Miscellany in 1860 after Dickens's estrangement from Catherine, is thought to have caused Dickens some embarrassment. In 1857, fresh from Andersen's visit, this is Dickens's recorded verdict in his letter to Jerdin: "his unintelligible vocabulary was marvellous".
It is not surprising that this uncomfortable stay of Andersen's and such questions of marvellousness, language and intelligibility, should have intrigued a contemporary writer like Sebastian Barry. Barry's primary focus over the last two decades, in both his drama and his fiction, has been the imaginative act of putting fictional words into the mouths of real people long gone, coupled with a fascination for the paradoxical symbiosis of language and silence and the strangenesses and familiarities inherent in language itself.