February 24 – Nikolai Gogol burns some of his manuscripts, including most of the second part of Dead Souls, telling acquaintances the action is a practical joke played on him by the Devil. He takes to his bed and dies a few days later.
March – Serialization of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House begins; the September installment introduces the first detective in an English novel.[1]
April 24 – Wilkie Collins' first contribution to Household Words, "The traveller's story of a terribly strange bed", is an early example of crime fiction involving the (Paris) police.[5]
April 29 – Roget's Thesaurus, created by retired British physician Peter Mark Roget, is first published as Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition in London.[6]
August – Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches («Записки охотника», Zapiski ohotnika; also known as Sketches from a Hunter's Album) are published in book form in Russia while the author is in internal exile; the work is subsequently banned in the Russian Empire. The first major writing to gain him international recognition and influential in the Russian tradition of literary realism, the stories are notable for their sympathy for the privations of serfdom in Russia in the prelude to the emancipation reform of 1861.[7]
Leo Tolstoy's debut novel, Childhood («Детство», Detstvo), is published under the initials L. N. in this month's issue of the Saint Petersburg literary journal Sovremennik.
Hanah Mullens' Karuna O Phulmonir Bibaran is the first Bengali novel.[11] The first publication of Bengali plays also takes place this year: C. C. Gupta's Kirtivilas and Taracharan Sikdar's Bhadrarjun.
The first translation of a substantial literary work into the Māori language, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as Ropitini Koruhu, translated by government official Henry T. Kemp, is published in Wellington, New Zealand, "under the direction of the Government".[12]
Leopold von Ranke – Französische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (History of France, Principally in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; publication begins)
^John William Leonard (1914). Woman's Who's who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada. American Commonwealth Company. p. 713.
