1862 in literature

Events

February – Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети (old spelling Отцы и дѣти), Ottsy i dety, literally "Fathers and Children") is published by Russkiy Vestnik in Moscow.

March 30 or 31 – The first two volumes of Victor Hugo's epic historical novel Les Misérables are published in Brussels followed on April 3 by Paris publication, with the remaining volumes following on May 15. The first English language translations are by Charles Edwin Wilbour, published in New York on June 7, and by Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall, published in London in October.

April 6 – Two months after joining the staff of General William Babcock Hazen, Ambrose Bierce participates in the Battle of Shiloh, later the subject of a memoir. Among those on the opposite side is future journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who will also record his experiences.

June – Nikolai Chernyshevsky is imprisoned in Saint Petersburg and begins his novel What Is To Be Done?

June 4 – Henry Morton Stanley, now a "Galvanized Yankee", joins the Union Army; he is discharged 18 days later because of illness.

July – George Eliot's historical novel Romola begins serialization in Cornhill Magazine, the first time she has published a full-length book in this format. George Murray Smith of the publishers Smith, Elder & Co. has agreed a £7,000 advance for it.

July 1 – Moscow's first free public library opens as The Library of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumiantsev Museum, predecessor of the Russian State Library.

July 4 – Charles Dodgson (better known as by his later pseudonym Lewis Carroll) extemporises a story for 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters on a rowing boat trip on The Isis from Oxford to Godstow. The story becomes the manuscript Alice's Adventures Underground and is published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

September 23 – Leo Tolstoy marries Sophia ("Sonya") Andreevna Behrs, 16 years his junior, in Moscow, having given her a diary detailing his previous sexual relations.

November 26 – Charles Dodgson sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground to Alice Liddell.

November 29 – Serialization of The Notting Hill Mystery by "Charles Felix" (probably Charles Warren Adams) commences in Once A Week (London); it is considered the first full-length detective novel in English.

December – Louisa May Alcott becomes a nurse at the Union hospital in Georgetown, D.C.

December 24 – William Dean Howells marries Elinor Mead at the American embassy in Paris.

date unknown

James Russell Lowell begins writing for The North American Review.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs begins writing about homosexuality under the pseudonym of "Numa Numantius".

Fiction

José de Alencar – Lucíola

Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Lady Audley's Secret

Camilo Castelo Branco – Amor de Perdição

Wilkie Collins – No Name

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The House of the Dead (Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvogo doma, book publication)

George Eliot – Romola (serialization)

Gustave Flaubert – Salammbo

Eugène Fromentin – Dominique

The Goncourt brothers (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt) – Sister Philomene (Sœur Philomène)

Victor Hugo – Les Misérables

Henry Kingsley – Ravenshoe

George MacDonald – David Elginbrod

Watts Phillips – The Honour of the Family

Elizabeth Stoddard – The Morgesons

William Makepeace Thackeray – The Adventures of Philip

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy – Prince Serebrenni (Князь Серебряный)

Anthony Trollope – Orley Farm (publication completed)

Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons

Mrs. Henry Wood – The Channings

Children and young people

Frances Freeling Broderip – Tale of the Toys, Told by Themselves

F. W. Farrar – St. Winifred's or The World of School

Henrietta Keddie (as Sarah Tytler) – Papers for Thoughtful Girls, with illustrative sketches of some girls' lives

Charlotte Yonge

Countess Kate

The Stokesley Secret

Drama

Émile Augier – Le Fils de Giboyer

Henrik Ibsen – Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie, first published)

Watts Phillips – His Last Victory

Edmund Yates – Invitations

Poetry

Pavlo Chubynsky – Shche ne vmerla Ukraina ("Ukraine's glory has not perished", later the Ukrainian national anthem)

Henrik Ibsen – Terje Vigen

George Meredith – Modern Love

Christina Rossetti – Goblin Market and other poems

Non-fiction

John Hill Burton – The Book-Hunter

Thomas De Quincey – Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets

John William Draper – The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe

Julia Kavanagh

English Women of Letters

French Women of Letters

George Perkins Marsh – The Origin and History of the English Language

John Ruskin – Unto This Last

Leo Tolstoy – "The School at Yasnaya Polyana"

Births

January 24 – Edith Wharton, American novelist (died 1937)

May 1 – Marcel Prévost, French dramatist (died 1941)

May 9 – Hugh Stowell Scott (Henry Seton Merriman), English novelist (died 1903)

May 15 – Arthur Schnitzler, Austrian dramatist and novelist (died 1931)

June 6 – Henry Newbolt, English poet (died 1938)

August 1 – Montague Rhodes James, English scholar and short story writer (died 1936)

August 2 – Paul Bujor, Romanian politician, zoologist and short story writer (died 1952)

August 6 – Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, English historian (died 1932)

August 29 – Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian poet and playwright (died 1949)

September 2 – Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉 覚三), Japanese writer on the arts (died 1913)

September 27 – Francis Adams, Anglo-Australian poet, novelist and dramatist (died 1893)

October 13 – Mary Kingsley, English travel writer (died 1900)

November 15 – Gerhart Hauptmann, German dramatist, novelist and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (died 1946)

December 8 – Georges Feydeau, French farceur (died 1921)

December 16 – John Fox, Jr., American novelist and journalist (died 1919)

December 23 – Henri Pirenne, Belgian historian (died 1935)

Deaths

January 11 – Jean Philibert Damiron, French philosopher (born 1794)

February 24 – Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Danish novelist and poet (born 1789)

April 6 – Fitz James O'Brien, Irish-American science fiction pioneer (born 1828)

May 6 – Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher (born 1817)

May 25 – Johann Nestroy, Austrian dramatist (born 1801)

August 27 – Thomas Jefferson Hogg, English biographer (born 1792)

November 26 – Julia Pardoe, English novelist and historian (born 1806)

November 30 – James Sheridan Knowles, Irish dramatist and actor (born 1784)

December 17 – Katherine Thomson, writing as Grace Wharton, English novelist and historian (born 1797)

Awards

Gaisford Prize – Robert William Raper (Trinity) for comic iambic verse: Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II, Act 4, Sc. 3

Newdigate Prize – Arthur C. Auchmuty, "Julian the Apostate"