•
January 28 –
The Yale News becomes the first daily college newspaper in the United States. • June –
Robert Louis Stevenson's three linked
detective fiction short stories The Suicide Club featuring Prince Florizel begin publication in
The London Magazine. •
June 10 – Konrad Korzeniowski, the future English-language novelist
Joseph Conrad, sets foot on British soil for the first time, at
Lowestoft from the SS
Mavis. • July – The
Scottish poetaster William McGonagall, a self-described "poet and tragedian", journeys on foot from
Dundee to
Balmoral Castle over mountainous terrain and through a thunderstorm in a fruitless attempt to perform his verse before
Queen Victoria. •
August 3 –
Guy de Maupassant writes to
Gustave Flaubert, complaining about his monotonous life and his new job as an employee of the Ministry of Public Instruction in France. • October – The Peabody Institute Library (later
George Peabody Library) opens to the public in
Baltimore,
Maryland. •
December 30 –
Henry Irving's production of
Hamlet, with himself in the title rôle playing opposite
Ellen Terry as
Ophelia, opens at the
Lyceum Theatre, London (of which they have taken over the management). •
unknown dates •
Anton Chekhov writes his first substantial play, known as
Platonov, but it is not completed, titled, performed or published in his lifetime. • The
Johns Hopkins University Press is established in Baltimore, Maryland, as the University Publication Agency, making it the oldest continuously operating
university press in the United States. • The
Remington No. 2
typewriter, the first with a
shift key enabling production of
lower as well as upper case characters, is introduced in the United States. ==New books==