1839 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1839.

Events

January 21 – Åbo Svenska Teater in Åbo, Finland, opens with a performance of the Swedish-language play Gubben i Bergsbygden.
March – W. Harrison Ainsworth takes over editorship of Bentley's Miscellany from Charles Dickens at the end of the year. Until April serializations of their respective novels Jack Sheppard and Oliver Twist have been running simultaneously in the magazine.
April – Washington Irving begins contributing regularly to The Knickerbocker, and will publish thirty new pieces in the magazine through March 1841 — including "The Creole Village," where he coins the phrase "the almighty dollar".
May 31 – An important British constitutional case of Stockdale v Hansard begins when publisher John Joseph Stockdale sues for libel after John Roberton's pseudo-medical work On Diseases of the Generative System is declared in a parliamentary report to be indecent.
September – The first known London production of Love's Labour's Lost after Shakespeare's era opens at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, with Madame Vestris as Rosaline.
unknown dates
*Mikhail Lermontov publishes the first two parts of A Hero of Our Time in Otechestvennye Zapiski. The novel comes to be seen as a pioneering classic of Russian psychological realism.
*Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance by the 'Pearl Poet', is first published complete in Syr Gawayne, a collection of early romance poems by Scottish and English authors relating to that knight of the Round Table, edited by Frederic Madden for the Bannatyne Club.
*George Bell establishes the London publisher George Bell & Sons as an educational bookseller in Bouverie Street.

New books

Fiction

W. Harrison Ainsworth – Jack Sheppard
Carl Jonas Love Almqvist – Det går an
Honoré de Balzac
*Béatrix
*Illusions perdues, II: Un Grand homme de province à Paris
*Pierre Grassou
Nicolaas Beets – Camera Obscura
Fredrika Bremer – Hemmet eller familje-sorger och fröjder
Sarah Burney – The Romance of Private Life: The Renunciation and The Hermitage
Charles Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby
Alexandre Dumas – Captain Pamphile
Catherine Gore – The Cabinet Minister
Maurits Hansen – Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen
Frederick Marryat – Diary in America
Harriet Martineau – Deerbrook
Ellen Pickering
*Nan Darrell, or The Gypsy Mother
*The Fright
Edgar Allan Poe
*The Fall of the House of Usher
*William Wilson
George Sand
*Pauline
*Spiridion
Jules Sandeau – Marianna
Stendhal – The Charterhouse of Parma
Philip Meadows Taylor – Confessions of a Thug
Cirilo Villaverde – ''Cecilia Valdés''

Children and young people

Catherine Sinclair – Holiday House: A Book for the Young
Frederick Marryat – The Phantom Ship
Hans Christian Andersen – Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. Second Booklet comprising "The Garden of Paradise", "The Flying Trunk" and "The Storks"

Drama

Poetry

Philip James Bailey – Festus
Cláudio Manuel da Costa – Vila Rica
Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué – Barzaz Breiz
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – ''Voices of the Night''

Non-fiction

Louis Blanc – L'Organisation du travail
Charles Darwin – The Voyage of the Beagle
Mrs William Ellis – The Women of England: their social duties and domestic habits
Michael Faraday – Experimental Researches in Electricity
George W. M. Reynolds – Grace Darling; or, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands
Jared Sparks – Life of Washington
John Tallis – ''Tallis Directory''

Births

January 7 – Ouida, English novelist
January 26 – Mary Ann Maitland, Scottish-born Canadian author
February 1 – James Herne, American dramatist
February 22 – Francis Pharcellus Church, American editor and publisher
March 9 – Františka Stránecká, Czech writer and collector of Moravian folklore
March 16 – Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Literature
March 28 – Emily Lee Sherwood Ragan, American author and journalist
April 18 – Henry Kendall, Australian poet
June 21 – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian poet and novelist
June 22 – Clara Augusta Jones Trask, American dime novelist
July 5 – Helen Stuart Campbell, American author, editor, and reformer
July 11 – Kate Sanborn, American author and essayist
July 21 – Emma Rood Tuttle, American author and poet
August 4 – Walter Pater, English writer
August 9 – Gaston Paris, French writer and scholar
August 25 – Martha E. Cram Bates, American writer, journalist, and editor
September 10 – Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher
November 4 – S. M. I. Henry, American author, evangelist, and reformer
November 16 – William De Morgan , English novelist and potter
November 29 – Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian dramatist
December 12 – Charlotte Frances Wilder, American writer
December 23 – Lucinda Barbour Helm, American author, editor, and activist

Deaths

January 16 – Edmund Lodge, English biographer and writer on heraldry
April 11 – John Galt, Scottish novelist and entrepreneur
April 13 – Robert Millhouse, English weaver poet
April 22 – Thomas Haynes Bayly, English poet, songwriter and dramatist
May 9 – Joseph Fiévée, French journalist, novelist, essayist and playwright
May 17 – Archibald Alison, Scottish author
May 21 – José María Heredia y Campuzano, Cuban poet
June 26 – Winifred Gales, English novelist and memoirist
August 3 – Dorothea von Schlegel, German novelist and translator
September 4 – Hermann Olshausen, German theologian
September 28 – William Dunlap, American dramatist
October 11 – Leonor de Almeida Portugal, 4th Marquise of Alorna, Portuguese noblewoman, painter, and poet
October 22 – Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet
unknown dates
*Elizabeth Dawbarn, English writer on religion and child care
*Mary Pilkington, English novelist, poet and children's writer

Awards

Newdigate prize – John Ruskin