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

English author Anthony Trollope publishes The Warden, the first in his series of six Barsetshire novels

G.H. Lewes encourages Marian to try her hand at fiction and her first story, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton' is successfully published

Gustave Flaubert publishes Madame Bovary, a novel of frustrated romanticism in a provincial French context

In Tom Brown's Schooldays Thomas Hughes depicts the often brutal aspects of an English public school

Oliver Wendell Holmes' book The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is the first in a breakfast-table series

English author George Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede

French author Stendhal publishes his novel La Chartreuse de Parme ('The Charterhouse of Parma')

Charles Dickens publishes his French Revolution novel, A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens begins serial publication of his novel "Great Expectations" (in book form 1861)

George Eliot publishes The Mill on the Floss, her novel about the childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver

Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas

Victor Hugo publishes his novel Les Misérables, an immensely complex story about the adventures of ex-convict Jean Valjean

Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland

Dostoevsky publishes Notes from the House of the Dead, a semi-autobiographical novel about life in a Siberian labour camp

English author Charles Kingsley publishes an improving fantasy for young children, The Water-Babies

Dostoevsky publishes Notes from Underground, the bitter memories of a retired civil servant that is often described as the first existentialist novel

Samuel Clemens, writing under the pseudonym Mark Twain, has immediate success with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier

Leo Tolstoy publishes the first volume of his epic novel War and Peace, following the lives of several aristocratic families during the Napoleonic wars

Dostoevsky publishes Crime and Punishment, a novel narrated by Raskolnikov, a St Petersburg student and murderer

US author Louisa May Alcott begins serial publication of her book for children, Little Women (in book form 1869)

Dostoevsky publishes The Idiot, a novel about the simple-minded and truthful Prince Myshkin

French author Émile Zola publishes The Fortune of the Rougons, the first in a 20-novel series that he calls Les Rougon-Macquart