<P> "The Princess and the Pea" was first published in Copenhagen, Denmark by C.A. Reitzel on 8 May 1835 in an unbound 61 - page booklet called Tales, Told for Children . First Collection . First Booklet. 1835 . (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn . Første Samling . Første Hefte. 1835 .). "The Princess and the Pea" was the third tale in the collection, with "The Tinderbox" ("Fyrtøiet"), "Little Claus and Big Claus" ("Lille Claus og store Claus"), and "Little Ida's Flowers" ("Den lille Idas Blomster"). The booklet was priced at twenty - four shillings (the equivalent of 25 Dkr. or approximately US $5 as of 2009), and the publisher paid Andersen 30 rixdollars (US $450 as of 2009). A second edition was published in 1842, and a third in 1845 . "The Princess and the Pea" was reprinted on 18 December 1849 in Tales. 1850 . with illustrations by Vilhelm Pedersen . The story was published again on 15 December 1862, in Tales and Stories . First Volume . 1862 . </P> <P> The first Danish reviews of Andersen's 1835 tales appeared in 1836, and were hostile . Critics disliked the informal, chatty style, and the lack of morals, and offered Andersen no encouragement . One literary journal failed to mention the tales at all, while another advised Andersen not to waste his time writing "wonder stories". He was told he "lacked the usual form of that kind of poetry...and would not study models". Andersen felt he was working against their preconceived notions of what a fairy tale should be and returned to writing novels, believing it to be his true calling . </P> <P> Charles Boner was the first to translate "The Princess and the Pea" into English, working from a German translation that had increased Andersen's lone pea to a trio of peas in an attempt to make the story more credible, an embellishment also added by another early English translator, Caroline Peachey . Boner's translation was published as "The Princess on the Peas" in A Danish Story - Book in 1846 . Boner has been accused of missing the satire of the tale by ending with the rhetorical question, "Now was not that a lady of exquisite feeling?" rather than Andersen's joke of the pea being placed in the Royal Museum . Boner and Peachey's work established the standard for English translations of the fairy tales, which, for almost a century, as Wullschlager notes, "continued to range from the inadequate to the abysmal". </P> <P> Wullschlager observes that in "The Princess and the Pea" Andersen blended his childhood memories of a primitive world of violence, death, and inexorable fate, with his social climber's private romance about the serene, secure and cultivated Danish bourgeoisie, which did not quite accept him as one of their own . Researcher Jack Zipes said that Andersen, during his lifetime, "was obliged to act as a dominated subject within the dominant social circles despite his fame and recognition as a writer"; Andersen therefore developed a feared and loved view of the aristocracy . Others have said that Andersen constantly felt as though he did not belong, and longed to be a part of the upper class . The nervousness and humiliations Andersen suffered in the presence of the bourgeoisie were mythologized by the storyteller in the tale of "The Princess and the Pea", with Andersen himself the morbidly sensitive princess who can feel a pea through 20 mattresses . </P>

What is the moral of the story princess and the pea