The Emperor’s New Clothes

Hans Christian Andersen published The Emperor’s New Clothes in Copenhagen in April 1837, in the third booklet of his Fairy Tales Told for Children. The same booklet carried The Little Mermaid. He took the plot from a Spanish story in the medieval collection El Conde Lucanor, which he read in a German version. The Danish title is Kejserens nye Klæder. Andersen wrote about 156 tales, and this one gave several languages a phrase for public pretense.

Where this text comes fromWhat you are copying is not Andersen. It is a Victorian English translator, working from the Danish of 1837, and the page linked below carries that translation rather than the original Danish, whose title Andersen wrote as Kejserens nye Klæder. That matters for the rhythm: the long comma-linked clauses here belong to nineteenth-century English prose style, not to Andersen’s much plainer Danish, which was written to be read aloud to children and was criticized at the time for sounding too spoken. The fragment sits at the very start, before either impostor has said a word.

What you might not noticeThe translation calls the city very gay and daily visited by numerous foreigners. Both phrases meant something plainer in Victorian English than they do now, and the fragment is a small lesson in how fast a translation ages around a text that does not. Source

What it trainsTwo capital letters in the whole fragment and both of them open a sentence, so Shift fires exactly twice and never inside a line. Among the tales gathered here that is unusual: three of the four Aesop fables beside it begin with a run of letters in upper case, so on those the little finger works from the very first keystroke. Everything here is in the commas instead, six of them across two sentences, arranged in the loose subordinate clauses that Victorian translators favored. The lines are not broken by a poet, so the text wraps wherever your screen decides and copying it accurately means reading words rather than following line ends. Nothing is hyphenated and no word passes ten letters.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource