I really love the less famous stories by Andersen that involve objects or insects… A needle, a coin in a foreign land, a teapot that feels empty, a tree (that wants to be cut down!) have deep inner thoughts; a butterfly in love! In all those stories the last sentence introduces some sort of a final twist.

About a decade ago I was at a museum in Odense, Denmark. I vaguely remember a comical story about him and Charles Dickens. In that Andersen would regularly visit Dickens and stay with him and his family. The gist was that Dickens found this to be quite irritating, as he was not enthused by Andersen's company, finding him to be much too emotional and having "strange" Danish customs.