promise of rich reward; both tales feature three chambers filled with riches; both tales have heroes refusing to part with a magic luminant and then winning a princess through its use. The story of Aladdin had a special emotional significance for Andersen. As a poor grammar school student in Copenhagen, he was invited to stay with a prominent Copenhagen family in the Amalienborg Palace. There, he was given a Danish translation of Shakespeare, and wrote in his diary on 12 December 1825:"It's going for me as it did for Aladdin, who says at the close of the work as he stands at a window of the palace: Down there I walked when just a lad Each Sunday, if I was but allowed And gazed with wonder at the Sultan's palace. Five or six years ago, I, too, was walking around on the streets down there, didn't know a soul here in town, and now I am gloating over my Shakespeare in the home of a kind and respected family. O Lord, I could kiss you!" Andersen was familiar with and widely read in folk and fairy lore. The princess locked in a tower in "The Tinderbox" has its counterpart in "Rapunzel"; the trail of flour mirrors the trail of grain in "Hansel and Gretel"; and the doors marked with chalk recall those from "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" – another tale from The Arabian Nights. Composition On New Year's Day 1835, Andersen wrote his friend Henriette Hanck: "I am now starting on some 'fairy tales for children'. I am going to win over future generations, you may want to know", and, in a letter dated February 1835, he wrote the poet Bernhard Severin Ingemann: "I have started some 'Fairy Tales Told for Children' and believe I have succeeded. I have told a couple of tales which as a child I was happy about, and which I do not believe are known, and have written them exactly the way I would tell them to a child". Andersen completed the tales by March 1835 and told Admiral Wulff's daughter, Henriette: "I have also written some fairy tales for children; Ørsted says about them that if The Improvisatore makes me famous then these will make me immortal, for they are the most perfect things I have written; but I myself do not think so". On 26 March, he observed that "they [the