Neuroqueering on the lawn

Hans Christian Andersen’s tantrum in Charles Dickens’s garden was a case of ‘too muchness’, emotions bursting past respectability

by Siobhan Unwin & Kathryne Ford  BIO

When Hans met Charles. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London/Wikipedia

is associate lecturer in education at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Her research sits at the intersection of critical disability studies, queering and neuroqueering through education and cultural analysis.

is a lecturer in the School of Education at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. She is an interdisciplinary researcher with a particular interest in life-writing, biofiction, and cultural memory.

Edited byPam Weintraub

The English countryside in the mid-19th century could be an idyllic retreat. It is breakfast time and you are Charles Dickens, respectable author and exemplar of etiquette, sure that today will be safe and uneventful. Searching the house for your daughters, you also find your overstayed houseguest from Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen – famed author of fairy tales like The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling – face down on the grass, in the middle of a complete meltdown on your lawn, after receiving news of a bad book review. The Victorian era remains the measuring stick for (ostensibly) respectable domesticity, where emotions are repressed and ankles sequestered in attempts at control. Nonetheless, here lies Andersen, actively proving that even great authors were one lawn tantrum away from tearing at this veneer of respectability.

And indeed, Andersen has since been headcanoned, with great enthusiasm, as a 19th-century ‘disaster bi’. A disaster bisexual is less an identity or a diagnosis than a way of reading scenes that spill over. Messy. Earnest. Intensely sincere to the point of social detonation. Seen in modern drama from Bridgerton to Saltburn, they are characterised by living, loving and feeling in a perpetual crescendo, then come to a full stop when they melt down.

The term circulates now as affectionate shorthand, especially online, for people and characters who come in too hot, overshare, and punctuate the resulting social chaos with wit. To the chronically online, Andersen’s correspondence, travels and attachments now read as exasperating yet endearing. But Dickens, that poor man, did not have Tumblr. What he had was a lawn.

Charles Dickens reading to his daughters Mamie and Katey in the garden of Gad’s Hill; painting after Joseph Athanase Aufray, after a photo by Mason & Co, c1869. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London/Wikipedia

As Dickens in 1857, you offer Andersen reassurance. Gentle reason. Perspective. After all, you understand the impact of a bad book review (the criticism of your 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit still stings). Nonetheless, your words barely clear the air before Andersen begins to weep. Not quietly. Not briefly. Not in a way that can be absorbed and moved past. A full-throated sob and a heavy stream of tears, earth streaked on his face and shirt. He stays there. The scene does not resolve. The emotional alarm bell keeps ringing, time stretches. Dickens’s daughter Katey stares, struggling to reconcile this sobbing spectacle with her assessment of their Danish guest as ‘a bony bore’. Dickens, the great manager of feeling in fiction, realises, with dawning horror, that he – despite priding himself on being the ‘Inimitable’ – has lost control of the atmosphere entirely.

We have all encountered an Andersen. Some of us have loved one. Some of us have been asked whether we really have the capacity to care for them. Some of us are an Andersen. We could treat Andersen’s collapse as a personality problem: a man who simply felt too much and too openly. But what makes the lawn tantrum intolerable is that the Victorian sense of propriety relied on tightly managed bodies, disciplined masculinity, and a strict division between private interior and public display. These expectations – the norms and scripts that still govern our modern social lives – buy into the fantasy that collapse can be avoided if only the most vulnerable behave better. The question is, when these scripts fail, whose collapse will we tolerate – and how many people will we lose by demanding composure?

The lawn, and situations like it, expose an impasse: what happens when feeling exceeds the social scripts meant to contain it. Neuroqueering – the practice of challenging norms about how bodies, minds and emotions should behave – makes that impasse visible, while neuroqueer excess offers a way to understand what spills beyond those norms.

Seeing Andersen and Dickens through the lens of neuroqueer excess is not an attempt to retrospectively diagnose or categorise them, but to use their scenes of overflow to consider how norms are enforced, resisted, and broken. Neuroqueering, as we use it here, is not an identity to be claimed so much as a verb, a doing.

On Dickens’s lawn, these rules are not theoretical. They show up as expectations: speak proportionately, recover quickly, be gentlemanly. Dickens thus acts not merely as a distressed host but as an enforcer of the Victorian norms that Andersen breaks.

This is where a neuroqueering approach changes the terms of the encounter. Instead of asking why Andersen cannot control himself, it asks why Dickens’s preferred forms of speech, feeling and recovery are treated as natural, proper and morally superior. Scholars such as Nick Walker and M Remi Yergeau examine how these often-invisible rules govern the ways bodies, minds and feelings are permitted to move through the world. Drawing on queer theory and neurodivergent ways of knowing, their........

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