Remember When: The Boy Who Dreamed in Stories

He grew up in a cramped apartment above a shop, inventing worlds out of scraps of paper and the stories his grandmother told him by candlelight. His father, a shoemaker who never lost his sense of wonder, built him a small toy theater — and in that little stage, Hans Christian Andersen first learned that stories could become worlds, and worlds could become magic. No one would have predicted that those worlds would eventually be read by hundreds of millions of children across nearly every country on earth.

April 2, 1805, is the birthday of Hans Christian Andersen — born in Odense, Denmark, to a shoemaker father and a mother who could barely read. Andersen himself struggled with literacy well into his teens, mocked at school, set apart by poverty and a restless, associative mind that teachers didn't know what to do with. He was, in almost every way, the kind of child that systems of education are most likely to leave behind.

Instead, he became one of the most widely read authors in human history. "The Little Mermaid." "Thumbelina." "The Ugly Duckling." "The Snow Queen." Stories that on their surface seem like fairy tales but carry, at their core, something harder and more enduring — the dignity of the outsider, the power of the imagination, the insistence that a child who is different is not less.

April 2 is now celebrated globally as International Children's Book Day, in his honor. It is a day that asks us to think about what every child deserves: access to books, to stories, to teachers who believe in them, to schools that do not shut the door in their faces before they've had a chance to walk through.

At a moment when books are being pulled from school shelves and public school funding is being drained, that question is not a sentimental one. It is a political one. Leading Ladies Vote believes every child deserves the chance to discover their own story — and the world that might open up because of it.

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