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]
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.[6]
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.
Pierre Larousse and Augustin Boyer found a publishing house in Paris.[9]
Hanah Mullens' Karuna O Phulmonir Bibaran is the first Bengali novel.[10] The first publication of Bengali plays also takes place this year: C. C. Gupta's Kirtivilas and Taracharan Sikdar's Bhadrarjun.
probable – The first printing press in the Faeroe Islands is established.[11]
Leopold von Ranke – Französische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (History of France, Principally in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; publication begins)
^Smith, Gail K. (2001). "The Sentimental Novel: The Example of Harriet Beecher Stowe". In Bauer, Dale M.; Gould, Philip (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing. Cambridge University Press. p. 221. ISBN0521660033.
