1862 in literature

Events

• February – Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons is published by Russkiy Vestnik in Moscow.
• March 30 or 31 – The first two volumes of Victor Hugo's epic historical novel Les Misérables appear in Brussels, followed on April 3 by Paris publication, with the remaining volumes on May 15. The first English-language translations, by Charles Edwin Wilbour, are published in New York on June 7, and by Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall, in London in October.
• April 6 – Two months after joining the staff of General William Babcock Hazen, Ambrose Bierce joins in the Battle of Shiloh, later the subject of a memoir. Among those on the opposite side is the future journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who will also record his experiences.
• April 28 – Thomas Hardy becomes an assistant to architect Arthur Blomfield.
• June – Nikolai Chernyshevsky is imprisoned in Saint Petersburg and begins his novel What Is To Be Done?
• June 4 – Henry Morton Stanley, now a "Galvanized Yankee", joins the Union Army; he is discharged 18 days later because of illness.
• July – George Eliot's historical novel Romola begins serialization in Cornhill Magazine, the first time she has published a full-length book in this format. George Murray Smith of the publishers Smith, Elder & Co. has agreed a £7,000 advance for it.
• July 1 – Moscow's first free public library opens as The Library of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumiantsev Museum, predecessor of the Russian State Library.
• July 4 – Charles Dodgson extemporises a story for 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters on a rowing trip on The Isis from Oxford to Godstow. The story becomes a manuscript titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground and is published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
• September 23 – Leo Tolstoy marries Sophia (Sonya) Andreevna Behrs, 16 years his junior, in Moscow, having given her a diary detailing his previous sexual relations.
• November 26 – Charles Dodgson sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground to Alice Liddell.
• November 29 – Serialization of The Notting Hill Mystery by "Charles Felix" commences in Once A Week, with illustrations by George du Maurier; it is seen as the first full-length detective novel in English.
• December – Louisa May Alcott becomes a nurse at the Union hospital in Georgetown
• December 24 – William Dean Howells marries Elinor Mead at the American Embassy in Paris.

• James Russell Lowell begins writing for The North American Review.
• Karl Heinrich Ulrichs begins writing about homosexuality under the pseudonym of "Numa Numantius".

New books

Fiction

• José de Alencar – Lucíola
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Lady Audley's Secret
• Camilo Castelo Branco – Amor de Perdição
• Wilkie Collins – No Name
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – The House of the Dead
• George Eliot – Romola
• Gustave Flaubert – Salammbo
• Eugène Fromentin – Dominique
• The Goncourt brothers – Sister Philomene
• Victor Hugo – Les Misérables
• Henry Kingsley – Ravenshoe
• George MacDonald – David Elginbrod
• Watts Phillips – The Honour of the Family
• Fritz Reuter – From My Farming Days
• John Skelton – Thalatta, or the Great Commoner
• Elizabeth Drew Stoddard – The Morgesons
• William Makepeace Thackeray – The Adventures of Philip
• Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy – Prince Serebrenni
• Anthony Trollope
• *Orley Farm
• *The Small House at Allington
• Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons
• Mrs. Henry Wood – ''The Channings''

Children and young people

• Frances Freeling Broderip – Tale of the Toys, Told by Themselves
• Catherine Crowe – The Adventures of a Monkey
• F. W. Farrar – St. Winifred's or The World of School
• Henrietta Keddie – Papers for Thoughtful Girls, with illustrative sketches of some girls' lives
• Charlotte Yonge
• *Countess Kate
• *''The Stokesley Secret''

Drama

• Émile Augier – Le Fils de Giboyer
• María Bibiana Benítez – La Cruz del Morro
• Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson – Sigurd Slembe
• Henrik Ibsen – Love's Comedy
• Watts Phillips – His Last Victory
• Edmund Yates – Invitations''

Poetry

• Pavlo Chubynsky – "Shche ne vmerla Ukraina"
• Henrik Ibsen – Terje Vigen
• George Meredith – Modern Love
• Christina Rossetti – ''Goblin Market and other poems''

Non-fiction

• John Hill Burton – The Book-Hunter
• Thomas De Quincey – Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets
• John William Draper – The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe
• Theodor Fontane – Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, volume 1, Die Grafschaft Ruppin
• Julia Kavanagh
• *English Women of Letters
• *French Women of Letters
• George Perkins Marsh – The Origin and History of the English Language
• John Ruskin – Unto This Last
• Elizabeth Missing Sewell – Impressions of Rome, Florence, and Turin
• John Skelton – Nugæ Criticæ
• Samuel Smiles – Lives of the Engineers
• Leo Tolstoy – "The School at Yasnaya Polyana"

Births

• January 24 – Edith Wharton, American novelist
• February 17 – Mori Ōgai, Japanese army surgeon, poet, translator and realist fiction writer
• April 11 – Lurana W. Sheldon, American author and newspaper editor
• May 1 – Marcel Prévost, French dramatist
• May 9 – Hugh Stowell Scott, English novelist
• May 15 – Arthur Schnitzler, Austrian dramatist and novelist
• June 6 – Henry Newbolt, English poet
• June 18 – Carolyn Wells, American novelist and poet
• July 16 – Ida B. Wells, American journalist and novelist
• August 1 – Montague Rhodes James, English scholar and short story writer
• August 2 – Paul Bujor, Romanian politician, zoologist and short story writer
• August 6 – Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, English historian
• August 21 – Emilio Salgari, Italian adventure novelist
• August 29 – Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian poet and playwright
• September 2 – Okakura Kakuzō, Japanese writer on the arts
• September 27 – Francis Adams, Anglo-Australian poet, novelist and dramatist
• October 13 – Mary Kingsley, English travel writer
• November 15 – Gerhart Hauptmann, German dramatist, novelist and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
• December 8 – Georges Feydeau, French farceur
• December 16 – John Fox, Jr., American novelist and journalist
• December 23 – Henri Pirenne, Belgian historian
• date unknown — Jessie King, Scottish essayist, poet, journalist

Deaths

• January 11 – Jean Philibert Damiron, French philosopher
• February 24 – Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Danish novelist and poet
• February 27 – Constantin Sion, Moldavian polemicist, genealogist and literary forger
• April 6 – Fitz James O'Brien, Irish-American science fiction pioneer
• May 6 – Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher
• May 25 – Johann Nestroy, Austrian dramatist
• August 27 – Thomas Jefferson Hogg, English biographer
• November 26 – Julia Pardoe, English novelist and historian
• November 30 – James Sheridan Knowles, Irish dramatist and actor
• December 17 – Katherine Thomson, writing as Grace Wharton, English novelist and historian

Awards

• Gaisford Prize – Robert William Raper for comic iambic verse: Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II, Act 4, Sc. 3
• Newdigate Prize – Arthur C. Auchmuty, "Julian the Apostate"