1859 in literature

Events

January? – Tidskrift för hemmet ("Home Review"), the first women's magazine in the Nordic countries, is established by Sophie Leijonhufvud and Rosalie Olivecrona in Stockholm (Sweden).

February 1 – George Eliot's Adam Bede, her first full-length novel, is published by John Blackwood in the United Kingdom. Contemporary reviews are largely positive, describing it as "of the highest class" and "first-rate"; however, it is also accused of being the "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" and circulating libraries refuse to stock it or will supply it only under the counter.

February 4 – German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf identifies substantial portions of the mid-4th century Codex Sinaiticus (an uncial manuscript of the Greek Bible) at Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in the Khedivate of Egypt and arranges for its presentation to his patron, Tsar Alexander II of Russia at Saint Petersburg.

April 30 – Charles Dickens's new weekly magazine All the Year Round is published for the first time in London, succeeding Household Words.

June–July – Frances Harper's "The Two Offers", the first English-language short story by an African American author, is published in the first volume of The Anglo-African Magazine (New York).

September – 23-year-old Isabella Beeton's compilation Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management begins publication as a partwork supplement to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine (published by her husband Samuel Orchart Beeton in London) shortly after the birth of her second son.

November 26 – Wilkie Collins's sensation novel The Woman in White, an early example of mystery fiction, begins serialization in All the Year Round.

Fiction

Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Village of Stepanchikovo («Село Степанчиково и его обитатели», Selo Stepanchikovo i evo obitateli)

George Eliot

Adam Bede

The Lifted Veil

Augusta Jane Evans – Beulah

Ivan Goncharov – Oblomov («Обломов»)

Mary Jane Holmes – Dora Deane

Charles Lever – Davenport Dunn : a man of our day

Hector Malot – Les Amants ("The Lovers")

George Meredith – The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Viktor Rydberg – Den siste Atenaren ("The Last Athenian")

George Sand

Elle et lui

L'Homme de neige

Jean de la Roche

Narcisse

Harriet Beecher Stowe – The Minister's Wooing

Leo Tolstoy – Family Happiness («Семейное счастье», Semeynoye Schast'ye; published in Russkiy vestnik)

Ivan Turgenev – Home of the Gentry («Дворянское гнездо», Dvorjanskoe gnezdo; published in Sovremennik, January)

Harriet E. Wilson – Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

Children and young people

R. M. Ballantyne – The World of Ice

Drama

Dion Boucicault – The Octoroon

Dinabandhu Mitra – Nil Darpan

Alexander Ostrovsky – The Storm

Watts Phillips – The Dead Heart

Aleksey Pisemsky – A Bitter Fate (Горькая судьбина, Gorkaya sudbina)

Poetry

See also 1859 in poetry

Edward Fitzgerald – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Alfred Tennyson – Idylls of the King

Victor Hugo – La Légende des siècles, first series

Non-fiction

Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species

William Henry Harvey – Phycologia Australica

Washington Irving – The Life of George Washington, Volume 5

Søren Kierkegaard – The Point of View of My Work as an Author (published posthumously; first full publication)

Karl Marx – Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

John Stuart Mill – On Liberty

Samuel Smiles – Self Help

Robert Vaughan – Revolutions in English History (3 vols, completed 1863)

Births

March 8 – Kenneth Grahame, Scottish-born children's author (died 1932)

March 26 – A. E. Housman, English poet (died 1936)

May 1 – Alexandru Philippide, Romanian linguist and polemicist (died 1933)

May 2 – Jerome K. Jerome, English humorous writer (died 1927)

May 22

Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish-born physician and prolific writer (died 1930)

Tsubouchi Shōyō (Tsubouchi Yūzō, 坪内 雄蔵), Japanese writer (died 1935)

June 8 — Mary Cholmondeley, English writer (died 1925)

July 8 — Annie Shepherd Swan, Scottish novelist (died 1943)

August 4 – Knut Hamsun, Norwegian Nobel Prize–winning author (died 1952)

September 24 – S. R. Crockett, Scottish novelist (died 1914)

September 26 – Irving Bacheller, American journalist and writer (died 1950)

October 18 – Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature (died 1941)

December 5 – Sidney Lee (Solomon Lee), English biographer (died 1926)

December 15 – L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto (died 1917)

Deaths

January 20 – Bettina von Arnim, German novelist (born 1785)

January 21 – Henry Hallam, English historian (born 1777)

January 28 – William H. Prescott, American historian (born 1796)

February 13 – Eliza Acton, English cookery writer and poet (born 1799)

February 27 – Thomas Kibble Hervey, Scottish-born poet and critic (born 1799)

April 14 – Lady Morgan, Irish novelist (born c. 1781)

April 16 – Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian and political author (tuberculosis, born 1805)

April 29 – Dionysius Lardner, Irish scientific writer (born 1793)

July 23 – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, French poet (born 1786)

September 2 – Delia Bacon, American playwright and Shakespeare scholar (born 1811)

October 4 – Karl Baedeker, German guidebook publisher (born 1801)

November 7 – Auguste Hilarion, French politician and writer (born 1769)

November 16 – William Spalding, Scottish writer and scholar (born 1809)

November 20 – Mountstuart Elphinstone, Scottish historian (born 1779)

November 28 – Washington Irving, American fiction writer, biographer and historian (born 1783)

December 1 – John Austin, English legal philosopher (born 1790 in literature)

December 8 – Thomas de Quincey, English essayist (born 1785)

December 16 – Wilhelm Grimm, German collector of folk tales (born 1786)

December 28 – Thomas Macaulay, English-born poet, historian and politician (heart attack, born 1800)