istoryworld
Events relating to literature
Charles Dickens' first novel, Oliver Twist, begins monthly publication (in book form, 1838)
In his Divinity School Address, delivered at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson criticizes formal religion and gives priority to personal spiritual experience
US author Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes Fanshawe, his first novel, at his own expense
Edgar Allan Poe publishes a characteristically gothic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher
The first issue of the quarterly magazine The Dial is issued by the Transcendentalists meeting at Ralph Waldo Emerson's home
US lawyer Richard Henry Dana has immediate popular success with Two Years Before the Mast, his account of his time as a merchant seaman
Herman Melville goes to sea on the whaler Acushnet and spends moe than a year in the south Pacific
August Dupin solves the case in Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered to be the first example of a detective story
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems includes 'The Village Blacksmith' and 'The Wreck of the Hesperus'
US social reformer Catherine Beecher publishes an influential book to empower women, Treatise on Domestic Economy
English poet Robert Browning publishes a vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge of The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The publication of the first part of the satirical novel Dead Souls, by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, proves a sensation in Russia
Honoré de Balzac begins publication of a collected edition of his fiction under the title La Comédie Humaine
English author Thomas Babington Macaulay publishes a collection of stirring ballads, Lays of Ancient Rome
Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Pit and the Pendulum, a cliff-hanging tale of terror at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition
William Hickling Prescott brings the Conquistadors dramatically to life in his 3-volume History of the Conquest of Mexico
Ebenezer Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol
In his novel Coningsby Benjamin Disraeli develops the theme of Conservatism uniting 'two nations', the rich and the poor
Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven and Other Poems
Henry David Thoreau moves into a hut that he has built for himself in the woods at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts
With his emphasis on the subjective experience of human Existenz, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard plants the seed of existentialism
Escaped slave Frederick Douglass publishes the first of three volumes of autobiograrphy
US author Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an early and thoughtful feminist study of women's place in society
Friedrich Engels, after running a textile factory in Manchester, publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England
Francis Parkman travels west into dangerous territory in Wyoming, an adventure he later describes in The Oregon Trail
