1859 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1859.

Events

c. January – Tidskrift för hemmet, the first women's magazine in the Nordic countries, is founded by Sophie Leijonhufvud and Rosalie Olivecrona in Stockholm.
February 1 – George Eliot's Adam Bede, her first full-length novel, is published by John Blackwood in the United Kingdom. Contemporary reviews are largely positive, describing it as "of the highest class". and "first-rate"; However, it is also accused of being "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" and circulating libraries refuse to stock it or will supply it only under the counter.
February 4 – German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf identifies portions of the mid-4th century Codex Sinaiticus at Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in the Khedivate of Egypt and arranges for its presentation to his patron, Tsar Alexander II of Russia at Saint Petersburg.
April 30 – Charles Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round is published for the first time in London, succeeding Household Words and containing the first serial installment of his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities.
June–July – Frances Harper's "The Two Offers", the first English-language short story by an African American author, is published in the first volume of The Anglo-African Magazine.
September – Twenty three-year-old Isabella Beeton's Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management begins publication as a partwork supplement to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, published by her husband Samuel Orchart Beeton in London.
November 26 – Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, an early example of mystery fiction, begins serialisation in All the Year Round.
unknown date – The first translation of Adam Mickiewicz's Polish epic poem Pan Tadeusz into another language, Belarusian, is made by the writer and dramatist Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich, in Vilnius, but pressure from the authorities of the ruling Russian Empire means he is able to publish only the first two chapters.

New books

Fiction

Ana Luísa de Azevedo Castro – D. Narcisa de Villar
George Webbe Dasent – Popular Tales from the Norse
Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Village of Stepanchikovo
George Eliot
*Adam Bede
*The Lifted Veil
Augusta Jane Evans – Beulah
Ivan Goncharov – Oblomov
Mary Jane Holmes – Dora Deane
Charles Lever – Davenport Dunn: A Man of our Day
Hector Malot – Les Amants
George Meredith – The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
John Neal — True Womanhood: A Tale
Viktor Rydberg – Den siste Atenaren
George Sand
*
*L'Homme de neige
*Jean de la Roche
*Narcisse
Harriet Beecher Stowe – The Minister's Wooing
Leo Tolstoy – Family Happiness
Ivan Turgenev – Home of the Gentry
Harriet E. Wilson – ''Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black''

Children and young people

R. M. Ballantyne – ''The World of Ice''

Drama

Poetry

Edward Fitzgerald – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Alfred Tennyson – Idylls of the King
Victor Hugo – La Légende des siècles, first series

Non-fiction

Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species
William Henry Harvey – Phycologia Australica
Washington Irving – The Life of George Washington, Volume 5
Søren Kierkegaard – The Point of View of My Work as an Author
Karl Marx – Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
John Stuart Mill – On Liberty
Samuel Smiles – Self-Help
Robert Vaughan – ''Revolutions in English History''

Births

January 29 – Ethel Hillyer Harris, American author
March 8 – Kenneth Grahame, Scottish-born children's author
March 16 – Jennie M. Bingham, American author
March 26 – A. E. Housman, English poet
May 1 – Alexandru Philippide, Romanian linguist and polemicist
May 2 – Jerome K. Jerome, English humorous writer
May 6 – Willem Kloos, Dutch poet and critic
May 22
* Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish-born physician and prolific writer
* Tsubouchi Shōyō, Japanese writer
June 8 — Mary Cholmondeley, English writer
June 10 — Jacques Perk, Dutch poet
July 8 — Annie S. Swan, Scottish novelist
July 13 — Marion Manville Pope, American poet and author of juvenile literature
August 4 – Knut Hamsun, Norwegian Nobel Prize–winning author
August 8 – Henry Gauthier-Villars, French writer
September 24 – S. R. Crockett, Scottish novelist
September 26 – Irving Bacheller, American journalist and writer
October 3 – Dumitru Theodor Neculuță, Romanian poet
October 18 – Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature
November 2 – Augusta Peaux, Dutch poet
November 23 – Clara H. Hazelrigg, American author, educator and reformer
December 5 – Sidney Lee, English biographer
December 15 – L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto
December 24 – Olive E. Dana, American author

Deaths

January 20 – Bettina von Arnim, German novelist
January 21 – Henry Hallam, English historian
January 28 – William H. Prescott, American historian
February 13 – Eliza Acton, English cookery writer and poet
February 27 – Thomas Kibble Hervey, Scottish-born poet and critic
April 14 – Lady Morgan, Irish novelist
April 16 – Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian and political author
April 29 – Dionysius Lardner, Irish scientific writer
July 23 – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, French poet
September 2 – Delia Bacon, American playwright and Shakespeare scholar
September 27 – Marițica Bibescu, Wallachian poet and literary patron
October 4 – Karl Baedeker, German guidebook publisher
November 7 – Auguste Hilarion, French politician and writer
November 16 – William Spalding, Scottish writer and scholar
November 20 – Mountstuart Elphinstone, Scottish historian
November 28 – Washington Irving, American fiction writer, biographer and historian
December 1 – John Austin, English legal philosopher
December 8 – Thomas de Quincey, English essayist
December 16 – Wilhelm Grimm, German collector of folk tales
December 28 – Thomas Babington Macaulay, English-born poet, historian and politician