Neha Patil (Editor)

1839 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1839.

Contents

Events

  • January 21 – Åbo Svenska Teater in Åbo (Turku), Finland, opens with a performance of Gubben i Bergsbygden.
  • May 31 – Important British constitutional case of Stockdale v Hansard is launched when publisher John Joseph Stockdale sues for libel after John Roberton's pseudo-medical work On Diseases of the Generative System (1811) is declared in a parliamentary report to be indecent.
  • Washington Irving begins contributing regularly to The Knickerbocker, and will publish thirty new pieces in the magazine — including "The Creole Village," in which he will coin the phrase "the almighty dollar" — through March 1841.
  • Mikhail Lermontov publishes first two parts of A Hero of Our Time (Герой нашего времени, Geroy nashevo vremeni) in Otechestvennye Zapiski. The novel comes to be considered a pioneering classic of Russian psychological realism.
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance by the 'Pearl Poet', is first published complete, in Syr Gawayne: a collection of ancient romance-poems by Scottish and English authors relating to that celebrated knight of the Round Table edited by Frederic Madden for the Bannatyne Club.
  • George Bell establishes the London publisher George Bell & Sons as an educational bookseller in Bouverie Street.
  • W. Harrison Ainsworth takes over editorship of Bentley's Miscellany from Charles Dickens at the end of the year. Until April serializations of their respective novels Jack Sheppard and Oliver Twist have been running simultaneously in the magazine.
  • Fiction

  • W. Harrison Ainsworth – Jack Sheppard
  • Carl Jonas Love AlmqvistDet går an (It's Acceptable, translated as Sara Videbeck and the Chapel)
  • Honoré de Balzac
  • Béatrix
  • Illusions perdues, II: Un Grand homme de province à Paris (Lost Illusions, II: A Distinguished Provincial in Paris)
  • Pierre Grassou
  • Nicolaas Beets (as Hildebrand) – Camera Obscura
  • Fredrika BremerHemmet eller familje-sorger och fröjder
  • Sarah BurneyThe Romance of Private Life: The Renunciation and The Hermitage
  • Charles DickensNicholas Nickleby (serialization completed and in book form)
  • Alexandre Dumas - Captain Pamphile
  • Maurits HansenMordet på Maskinbygger Rolfsen (The Murder of Engine-maker Rolfsen)
  • Frederick MarryatDiary in America
  • Harriet MartineauDeerbrook
  • Ellen Pickering
  • Nan Darrell, or The Gypsy Mother
  • The Fright
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Fall of the House of Usher
  • William Wilson
  • George Sand
  • Pauline
  • Spiridion
  • Jules SandeauMarianna
  • StendhalThe Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme)
  • Philip Meadows TaylorConfessions of a Thug
  • Cirilo VillaverdeCecilia Valdés
  • Children and young people

  • Catherine SinclairHoliday House. A Book for the Young
  • Frederick MarryatThe Phantom Ship
  • Drama

  • Edward Bulwer – Richelieu
  • Felicia HemansDe Chatillon
  • George SandGabriel
  • Juliusz SłowackiBalladyna
  • Poetry

  • Philip James Bailey (anonymous) – Festus
  • Cláudio Manuel da Costa (posthumous) – Vila Rica
  • Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué (compiler) – Barzaz Breiz ("Breton Ballads")
  • Henry Wadsworth LongfellowVoices of the Night
  • Non-fiction

  • Louis BlancL'Organisation du Travail
  • Charles DarwinThe Voyage of the Beagle
  • Mrs William Ellis – The Women of England: their social duties and domestic habits
  • Michael FaradayExperimental Researches in Electricity
  • George W. M. ReynoldsGrace Darling; or, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands
  • Jared SparksLife of Washington
  • John TallisTallis Directory
  • Births

  • January 7Ouida, English novelist (died 1908)
  • February 1 – James Herne, American dramatist (died 1901)
  • February 22Francis Pharcellus Church, American editor and publisher (died 1906)
  • March 16Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Literature (died 1907)
  • April 18Henry Kendall, Australian poet (died 1882)
  • June 21 – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian poet and novelist (died 1908)
  • August 4Walter Pater, English writer (died 1894)
  • August 9Gaston Paris, French writer and scholar (died 1903)
  • September 10Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher (died 1914)
  • November 16William De Morgan (sic), English novelist and potter (died 1917)
  • November 29Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian dramatist (died 1889)
  • Deaths

  • January 16Edmund Lodge, English biographer and writer on heraldry (born 1756)
  • April 11John Galt, Scottish novelist and entrepreneur (born 1779)
  • April 13Robert Millhouse, English weaver poet (born 1788)
  • April 22Thomas Haynes Bayly, English poet, songwriter and dramatist (born 1797)
  • May 9Joseph Fiévée, French journalist, novelist, essayist and playwright (born 1767)
  • May 17 – Archibald Alison, Scottish author (born 1757)
  • May 21 – José María Heredia y Campuzano, Cuban poet (born 1803)
  • June 26Winifred Gales, English novelist and memoirist (born 1761)
  • August 3Dorothea von Schlegel, German novelist and translator (born 1764)
  • September 4Hermann Olshausen, German theologian (born 1796)
  • September 28William Dunlap, American dramatist (born 1766)
  • October 22Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet (born 1802)
  • Unknown dates
  • Elizabeth Dawbarn, English writer on religion and child care (year of birth not known)
  • Mary Pilkington, English novelist, poet and children's writer (born 1761)
  • Awards

  • Newdigate prize – John Ruskin
  • In literature

  • Amitav Ghosh's novel Flood of Fire (2015) is set during the First Opium War.
  • Judith Rossner's novel Emmeline (1980) is based on events of this year.
  • Jules Verne's An Antarctic Mystery (Le Sphinx des glaces, 1897) follows on from Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).
  • References

    1839 in literature Wikipedia


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