istoryworld
Events relating to literature
An American poem, A Visit from St Nicholas, describes in every detail the modern Santa Claus
12-year-old Charles Dickens works in London in Warren's boot-blacking factory
Italian author Alessandro Manzoni begins publication (completed 1827) of his novel I Promessi Sposi ('The Betrothed')
In James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Natty Bumppo sides with a Mohican chief
Connecticut lexicographer Noah Webster publishes the definitive 2-volume scholarly edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language
20-year-old Edgar Allan Poe publishes Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems
Victor Hugo's romantic drama Hernani provokes a riot in the Paris audience on the first night
Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem 'Old Ironsides' prompts a public response that saves the frigate from the scrapyard
French author Stendhal publishes his novel Le Rouge et Le Noir ('The Red and the Black')
Victor Hugo publishes his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the hunchback, Quasimodo, is obsessed with Esmeralda
Samuel Francis Smith's patriotic hymn America is sung for the first time on July 4 in Boston
Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem The Last Leaf is inspired by an aged survivor of the Boston Tea Party
Russian poet Alexander Pushkin publishes a grand historical drama, Boris Godunov
The full text of Goethe's Faust, Parts 1 and 2, is published a few months after the poet's death
English author Frances Trollope ruffles transatlantic feathers with her Domestic Manners of the Americans, based on a 3-year stay
Alexander Pushkin publishes a novel in verse, Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin publishes his best-known short story, The Queen of Spades
American novelist William Gilmore Simms publishes Guy Rivers, the first of his series known as the Border Romances
French author Honoré de Balzac publishes Le Père Goriot, one of the key novels that he later includes in La Comédie Humaine
Alexis de Tocqueville publishes in French the first two volumes of his extremely influential study Democracy in America
The Partisan, set in South Carolina, launches the series of novels by William Gilmore Simms known as the Revolutionary Romances
24-year-old Charles Dickens begins monthly publication of his first work of fiction, Pickwick Papers (published in book form in 1837)
The Inspector General, a farce by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol satirising Russian offialdom, has tsar Nicholas I in the audience for the premiere
In his essay, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson sets out the fundamentals of the philolosphy of Transcendentalism
In The American Scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson urges his student audience to heed their own intellectuals rather than those of Europe
