Fairy and folk tale scholar Jack Zipes views "The Tinderbox" as Andersen's way of dealing with his anger at his superiors. In Andersen's early tales the rich and powerful are either overthrown or exposed as conceited, stupid, and arrogant. On another note, he observes, "Psychologically, Andersen’s hatred for his own class (his mother) and the Danish nobility (the king and queen) are played out bluntly when the soldier kills the witch and has the king and queen eliminated by the dogs. The wedding celebration at the end of the story is basically a celebration of the solidification of power by the bourgeois class in the nineteenth century: the unification of a middle-class soldier with a royal princess."