Poverty
“The Little Match Girl” presents a poignant critique of cultural attitudes to extreme poverty and inequality during the period of the industrial revolution. Using imagery and juxtaposition, Andersen contrasts the poverty of the little girl with the surrounding wealth. Bareheaded and barefoot, the girl slowly succumbs to hypothermia while wealthy people are safe indoors, ensconced in warmth and luxury of roast geese. She is nearly run down by fast-moving carriages that show no concern for her plight. The desperation of the poor is conveyed through the boy who steals her slipper, thinking one day that he’ll use it to cradle his child. The boy’s own desperate need leads him to take what he can when he can, with no regard for the girl’s safety. The tale starkly highlights the cost of an unequal society.
Cruelty
Another of the story's major themes is the cruelty directed toward the little girl. Cruelty comes from all directions: her father will beat her if she returns home without having sold any matches; carriages nearly run her down in the snow; a boy steals her slipper; and no one tries to help her as she freezes to death. Despite these injustices, the girl remains virtuous, never questioning or fighting back or practicing cruelty herself. Her ascendence to the heavens is her means of escape from the cruelty she endures.
Imagination
Another of the story’s major themes is imagination, and people’s relative capacity to utilize it. The little girl has profound imaginative abilities: with each strike of a match, she conjures a new vision of the warmth, food, prosperity, and love she lacks in her material reality. By contrast, when people see her frozen body at the end of the story, the narrator comments that they cannot imagine what was in the girl’s mind and heart before she died. All they see is an impoverished child who tried to keep warm as she froze.
The Afterlife
The theme of the afterlife enters the story when the little girl dies and ascends into the sky to be with her dead grandmother and with God. Although the little girl suffered from starvation, cold, and a lack of love on Earth, the narrator comments that in heaven she will not want for anything. As such, the story ends with a sense of hope. Christian spiritual understandings of life after death would have been prevalent in 19th-century Danish culture. Through a lens in which an afterlife is tangible, Andersen presents death as not something to fear but a relief from the cruelties of mortal existence.
