istoryworld
Events relating to literature
Edward Lear publishes his Book of Nonsense, consisting of limericks illustrated with his own cartoons
Mary Anne Evans' translation from the German of David Friedrich Strauss's controversial Life of Jesus is published anonymously
After marrying secretly, the English poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett go abroad to live in Florence
The three Brontë sisters jointly publish a volume of their poems and sell just two copies
English author William Makepeace Thackeray begins publication of his novel Vanity Fair in monthly parts (book form 1848)
Charlotte becomes the first of the Brontë sisters to have a novel published — Jane Eyre
Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his first collection of poems, many of which have appeared first in The Dial
William Hickling Prescott follows his great work on Mexico with a 2-volume History of the Conquest of Peru
Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights follows just two months after her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre
Honoré de Balzac completes publication of La Comédie Humaine, a 17-volume collected edition of his numerous novels and stories
Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë die within a period of eight months
Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels
Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, already serialized in 1847, is published in book form
Alfred Tennyson's elegy for a friend, In Memoriam, captures perfectly the Victorian mood of heightened sensibility
Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes his novel The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne is forced to wear the letter A for Adultress
US author Nathaniel Hawthorne bases his novel The House of the Seven Gables on a curse invoked against his own family
Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick; or, The Whale, a novel based on his own 18-month experience on a whaler in 1841-2
Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes a massively successful antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that sells 300,000 copies in its first year
London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
Thoreau publishes an account of his two years of self-sufficient transcendentalism in his hut at Walden Pond
Within six weeks of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, Tennyson publishes a poem finding heroism in the disaster
The first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is published anonymously, at his own expense, and contains just 12 poems
Longfellow publishes his American Indian epic, The Song of Hiawatha, in an irresistibly catchy metre
Tennyson publishes a long narrative poem, Maud, a section of which ('Come into the garden, Maud') becomes famous as a song
English author Anthony Trollope publishes The Warden, the first in his series of six Barsetshire novels
