1812 in literature

Events

• January 2 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lecture on Hamlet is given as part of a series of lectures on drama and Shakespeare; it has influenced Hamlet studies ever since.
• January 15 – Lord Byron takes his seat in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
• March 20 – First two cantos of Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are published in London by John Murray. This sells out in five days, giving rise to Byron's comment "I awoke one morning and found myself famous."
• May–July – The library of the Duke of Roxburghe is auctioned in London. On June 17 a presumed first edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, printed by Christopher Valdarfer of Venice in 1471, is sold to the Marquis of Blandford for £2,260, the highest price ever given for a book at that time. This is followed by a social meeting of bibliophiles under the chairmanship of 2nd Earl Spencer, the origin of the Roxburghe Club, formed by Thomas Frognall Dibdin.
• June 24–December 14 – The French invasion of Russia will form the climax of Tolstoy's 1869 novel War and Peace and feature several other works of literature.
• October 10 – The rebuilt Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London opens.
• December 9–20 – Leigh Hunt is tried and convicted of libel for calling the Prince Regent "a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace" in The Examiner on March 22.
• December 26 – Novelist Frederick Marryat is promoted to lieutenant after distinguished service at sea in the War of 1812.

New books

Fiction

• Sarah Burney – Traits of Nature
• Maria Edgeworth:
• *The Absentee
• *Emilie de Coulanges
• *Vivian
• Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès – Fantasmagoriana
• The Brothers Grimm – Grimm's Fairy Tales, volume 1
• Ann Hatton – The Fortress del Vechii
• Frances Margaretta Jacson – Things by their Right Names
• Charles Maturin – The Milesian Chief
• Rebecca Rush – Kelroy
• George Soane – The Eve of San Marco
• Louisa Stanhope – The Confessional of Valombre
• Elizabeth Thomas – The Vindictive Spirit
• Jane West – ''The Loyalists: An Historical Novel''

Children and young people

• Barbara Hofland – The History of a Clergyman's Widow and Her Young Family
• Johann David Wyss – ''The Swiss Family Robinson''

Drama

• Joanna Baillie – Orra
• Theodor Körner
• *Die Braut
• *Der grüne Domino
• *Der Nachtwächter
• *Zriny
• Adam Oehlenschläger – Stærkodder
• August von Kotzebue – ''Der arme Poet ''

Poetry

• Anna Laetitia Barbauld – Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
• Lord Byron – Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Devil's Walk: A Ballad
• James and Horace Smith – Rejected Addresses
• William Tennant – ''Anster Fair''

Non-fiction

• John Galt – Cursory Reflections on Political and Commercial Topics
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Die objektive Logik
• Sir Richard Colt Hoare – The Ancient History of South Wiltshire
• Mirza Abu Taleb Khan – Masir Talib fi Bilad Afranji
• James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale – The Depreciation of the Paper-currency of Great Britain Proved
• John Nichols – The Literary Anecdotes of the 18th Century, volume 1
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – ''Declaration of Rights''

Births

• February 7 – Charles Dickens, English novelist and editor
• February 15 – Chandos Wren-Hoskyns, English agricultural author and landowner
• February 19 – Zygmunt Krasiński, Polish poet
• May 7 – Robert Browning, English poet
• May 12 – Edward Lear, English nonsense poet, caricaturist and painter
• June 9 – Camilla Dufour Crosland, English writer and poet
• June 18 – Ivan Goncharov, Russian novelist and critic
• June 27 – Andrei Mocioni, Hungarian/Romanian journalist and literary patron
• July 5 – Antonio García Gutiérrez, Spanish dramatist
• August 22 – Geraldine Jewsbury, English novelist and woman of letters
• September 16 – Anna Louisa Geertruida Bosboom-Toussaint, Dutch novelist
• October 29 – Louise Granberg, Swedish playwright
• December 3 – Hendrik Conscience, Flemish novelist
• December 10 – Caroline M. Sawyer, American poet, writer, and editor
• December 23 – Samuel Smiles, Scottish self-help author
• unknown date
• * Louis du Couret, French explorer, military officer, and writer
• * Mohan Lal Kashmiri, Indian traveller and writer

Deaths

• February 13 – Jacques Marie Boutet, French dramatist and actor
• February 24 – Hugo Kołłątaj, Polish historian and philosopher
• March 18 – John Horne Tooke, English controversialist and cleric
• March 24 – Johann Jakob Griesbach, German Biblical commentator
• May 12 – Martha Ballard, American diarist
• July 14 – Christian Gottlob Heyne, German librarian and classicist
• October 28 – Susanna Duncombe, English poet and painter
• November 11 – Platon Levshin, Russian church historian
• November 16 – John Walter, English founder of The Times, London
• December 22 – Pierre Henri Larcher, French classicist and archeologist
• unknown date – Zalkind Hourwitz, Polish essayist