Mary Howitt’s Translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales

Hannah Persson’s essay looks at the early reception in England of Denmark’s most famous writer Hans Christian Andersen, showing how Andersen was (mis)represented in England as a result of the particular inflection given to his work by his translator, Mary Howitt. Examining Howitt’s praxis as a translator, Persson concludes that her (mis)understanding of Andersen’s tales as primarily intended for children led her to excise those elements which she deemed unfit for a young audience. Persson also shows the ideological charge by which translation could be marked at the time, a charge which meant that texts were not merely moved from one language to another but also appropriated and repurposed, by design or on occasion simply by accident, for a different cultural context.