1827 in literature

Events

January – Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin begins his diary, later published as Cín Lae Amhlaoibh.

February – Thomas De Quincey's essay On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts is published in Blackwood's Magazine.

February 23 – Sir Walter Scott's authorship of the Waverley Novels is first publicly acknowledged at an Edinburgh Theatrical Fund dinner.

April 16 (weekly from June 6) – Nathaniel Willis Senior begins publishing a new magazine for children, The Youth's Companion, in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the most enduring of its type, the magazine continues until 1929.

October 14 – Ludwig Tieck's Potsdam production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first to feature the incidental musical score composed by Felix Mendelssohn.

Samuel Griswold Goodrich publishes the first of the "Peter Parley" juvenile books in the United States that will continue until 1860.

Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street officer, the earliest collection of detective stories, is published in London by Henry Colburn.

Swedish theatre director Johan Peter Strömberg opens what will become the Christiania Theatre in Norway.

John James Audubon begins publication of the 10-volume The Birds of America in the United Kingdom.

Fiction

James Fenimore Cooper

The Prairie

The Red Rover

Benjamin Disraeli – Vivian Grey, vol. 2

Thomas Gaspey – Richmond

Émile de Girardin – Émile

Catherine Gore

The Lettre de Cachet

The Reign of Terror

Sarah Josepha Hale – Northwood: Life North and South (U.K. title: A New England Tale)

Wilhelm Hauff

Jud Süß

Phantasien im Bremer Ratskeller ("The Wine-Ghosts of Bremen")

Christian Isobel Johnstone – Elizabeth de Bruce

Sir Thomas Dick Lauder – The Wolf of Badenoch

Jane Webb (anonymously) – The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century

Alessandro Manzoni – I Promessi sposi (The Betrothed)

Sydney, Lady Morgan – The O'Briens and The O'Flaherties

Karoline Pichler – Die Schweden in Prag ("The Swedes in Prague")

Sir Walter Scott – Chronicles of the Canongate

Catharine Maria Sedgwick – Hope Leslie

Horatio Smith – Reuben Aspley

Children

Agnes Strickland – The Juvenile Forget Me Not; Or, Cabinet of Entertainment and Instruction

Non-fiction

Elizabeth Beverley – Veluti in speculum (letters on church singing, theater management, elocution etc.)

Encyclopædia Edinensis

Henry Hallam – The Constitutional History of England

William Macmichael – The Gold-Headed Cane

Lady Louisa Stuart – Memoir of Lady Mary Coke

New drama

John Baldwin Buckstone – Luke the Labourer

Christian Dietrich Grabbe – Herzog Theodor von Gotland

Victor Hugo – Cromwell

Poetry

Fitz-Greene Halleck – Alnwick Castle, with Other Poems

Heinrich Heine – Buch der Lieder ("Book of Songs")

John Keble – The Christian Year

Giacomo Leopardi – Operette Morali

Robert Pollok – The Course of Time

Edgar Allan Poe (as "A Bostonian") – Tamerlane and Other Poems (his first poetry collection)

Alfred and Charles Tennyson – Poems by Two Brothers

Births

February 22 – Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Bengali writer and philosopher (died 1894)

March 4 – Henrietta Keddie (Sarah Tytler), Scottish novelist and children's writer (died 1914)

March 25 – Edward Bradley, English novelist and cleric (died 1889)

April 10 – Lew Wallace, American soldier, politician and novelist (died 1905)

April 16 – Octave Crémazie, "the father of French Canadian poetry" (died 1879)

June 12 – Johanna Spyri, Swiss children's author (died 1901)

September 13 – Catherine Winkworth, English translator and hymnist (died 1878)

September 18 – John Townsend Trowbridge, American author (died 1916)

Deaths

February 18 – Joseph Heinrich Aloysius Gügler, Swiss philosopher and theologian (born 1782)

May 28 – William James, English naval historian (born 1780)

July 3 – David Davis (Castellhywel), Welsh minister and poet (born 1745)

July 22 – Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob, German economist (born 1759)

August 12 – William Blake, English poet and artist (born 1757)

September 15 – Robert Pollok, Scottish poet (born c. 1798)

October 10 – Ugo Foscolo, Greek-born Italian dramatist and poet (born 1778)

November – Alethea Lewis, English novelist (born 1749)

November 18 – Wilhelm Hauff, German poet and novelist (born 1802)

December 26 – Feliks Jarońskij, Polish philosopher (born 1777)

Awards

Newdigate Prize – Robert Stephen Hawker

In literature

May 12 – Establishment of the Pickwick Club, according to Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers (1836).