“Steam and Speed...”
Hans Christian Andersen was a well-travelled author. In a November 1840 diary entry he recorded his first experience in Germany of steam-driven trains, notes which two years later made their way into En Digters Bazar (most recently translated as “A Visit to Germany, Italy and Malta, 1840–1841”). His fourth journey to Sweden, in 1849, resulted in an 1851 book in which he not only recorded his experiences of Swedish technology, like the sluices in Trollhättan, the mechanical industries at Motala, and the copper mines at Falun, but also proposed a new poetics in which literature would merge with science. This programme made its way into some of his tales, his Eventyr, six of which are touched on here: “The Drop of Water” with its sardonic focus on microcosmic life, the apotheosis of railways in “A String of Pearls”, “The Dryad” and its exploitation of the 1867 Paris World Exhibition, the Newton portrait in “The Apple” (which has not been translated into English), the transatlantic telecommunication by cable in “The Great Sea Serpent”, and finally his vision in “The New Century’s Goddess” of a new age to come in which the poet has to interest himself in science and technical innovations.
