1839 in literature

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 Almqvist – Det 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 Bremer – Hemmet eller familje-sorger och fröjder

Sarah Burney – The Romance of Private Life: The Renunciation and The Hermitage

Charles Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby (serialization completed and in book form)

Alexandre Dumas - Captain Pamphile

Maurits Hansen – Mordet på Maskinbygger Rolfsen (The Murder of Engine-maker Rolfsen)

Frederick Marryat – Diary in America

Harriet Martineau – Deerbrook

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 Sandeau – Marianna

Stendhal – The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme)

Philip Meadows Taylor – Confessions of a Thug

Cirilo Villaverde – Cecilia Valdés

Children and young people

Catherine Sinclair – Holiday House. A Book for the Young

Frederick Marryat – The Phantom Ship

Drama

Edward Bulwer – Richelieu

Felicia Hemans – De Chatillon

George Sand – Gabriel

Juliusz Słowacki – Balladyna

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 Longfellow – Voices of the Night

Non-fiction

Louis Blanc – L'Organisation du Travail

Charles Darwin – The Voyage of the Beagle

Mrs William Ellis – The Women of England: their social duties and domestic habits

Michael Faraday – Experimental Researches in Electricity

George W. M. Reynolds – Grace Darling; or, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands

Jared Sparks – Life of Washington

John Tallis – Tallis Directory

Births

January 7 – Ouida, English novelist (died 1908)

February 1 – James Herne, American dramatist (died 1901)

February 22 – Francis Pharcellus Church, American editor and publisher (died 1906)

March 16 – Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Literature (died 1907)

April 18 – Henry Kendall, Australian poet (died 1882)

June 21 – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian poet and novelist (died 1908)

August 4 – Walter Pater, English writer (died 1894)

August 9 – Gaston Paris, French writer and scholar (died 1903)

September 10 – Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher (died 1914)

November 16 – William De Morgan (sic), English novelist and potter (died 1917)

November 29 – Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian dramatist (died 1889)

Deaths

January 16 – Edmund Lodge, English biographer and writer on heraldry (born 1756)

April 11 – John Galt, Scottish novelist and entrepreneur (born 1779)

April 13 – Robert Millhouse, English weaver poet (born 1788)

April 22 – Thomas Haynes Bayly, English poet, songwriter and dramatist (born 1797)

May 9 – Joseph 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 26 – Winifred Gales, English novelist and memoirist (born 1761)

August 3 – Dorothea von Schlegel, German novelist and translator (born 1764)

September 4 – Hermann Olshausen, German theologian (born 1796)

September 28 – William Dunlap, American dramatist (born 1766)

October 22 – Alexander 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).