• January •
The Knickerbocker is established by
Charles Fenno Hoffman as
The Knickerbacker: or, New-York monthly magazine. •
Alphonse de Lamartine is elected a
député of France. • c. January –
Richard Bentley (publisher) issues the first collected edition of
Jane Austen's novels. •
February 16 –
Victor Hugo and
Juliette Drouet begin a fifty-year affair. This is recorded in his novel
Les Misérables (1862) as the date of Marius and Cosette's wedding night (Part V, Book 6, Chapter 1). •
March 16 – ''Parley's Magazine'', an American periodical for young readers, publishes its first issue in Boston. •
March 25 –
Edmund Kean, playing
Othello to the
Iago of his son,
Charles Kean, collapses on the stage of the
Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, and dies two months later. •
June 10 – The Dramatic Authors Act passed in the
United Kingdom grants playwrights
copyright in their work. • Summer –
George Sand and
Alfred de Musset begin a two-year affair, recorded in their respective novels
Elle et lui (1859) and ''La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle'' (1836). •
September 15 – The English poet
Arthur Henry Hallam, a close friend of
Tennyson and engaged to be married to his sister
Emily, dies suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in
Vienna aged 22. This year in his memory Tennyson writes "
Ulysses" (completed October 20; published in
Poems of
1842), "Tithon" (an early version of "
Tithonus") and "
The Two Voices" (originally entitled "Thoughts of a Suicide"). He begins "Morte d'Arthur" (published 1842) and "Tiresias" (published
1885). In
1850 he will publish
In Memoriam A.H.H. •
October 3 – The Anglo-Irish actress
Harriet Smithson marries the French composer
Hector Berlioz in a civil ceremony at the British Embassy in Paris. •
December 1 –
Charles Dickens' first published work of fiction, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", is the first item in what will become
Sketches by Boz. It appears unsigned in the
Monthly Magazine (London). •
unknown dates • Publication begins in England of
The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, edited by
George Long. • The first of the
Bridgewater Treatises, examining science in relation to God, is published in England. • The first complete German translation of
Shakespeare's plays appears:
Shakespeares Dramatische Werke, by
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel,
Ludwig Tieck and his daughter
Dorothea, and
Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin. • Mrs
Favell Lee Mortimer's instructional text
The Peep of Day, or, A series of the earliest religious instruction the infant mind is capable of receiving appears in England. It will sell a million copies in 38 languages. • The first printing press in
Jerusalem is set up in the
Armenian Quarter. ==New books==