1870 in literature

Events

• January 19 – Ivan Turgenev attends and writes about the public execution by guillotine of the spree killer Jean-Baptiste Troppmann outside the gates of La Roquette Prisons in Paris.
• March 7 – Thomas Hardy meets his first wife, Emma Gifford, in Cornwall.
• March 28 – Serialisation of Kenward Philp's The Bowery Detective in The Fireside Companion begins, the first known story to include the word detective in the title.
• April–September – The serialisation of Charles Dickens' last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is left unfinished on his death on June 9 at Gads Hill Place in Kent, from a stroke, aged 58.
• May – Karl May begins a second four-year prison sentence for thefts and frauds, at Waldheim, Saxony.
• Spring – Serial publication begins of Aleksis Kivi's only novel Seitsemän veljestä, the first notable novel in the Finnish language.
• August 24/25 – Libraries of the University of Strasbourg and the City of Strasbourg at Temple Neuf are destroyed by fire during the Siege of Strasbourg in the Franco-Prussian War, resulting in the loss of 3,446 medieval manuscripts, including the original 12th-century Hortus deliciarum compiled by Herrad of Landsberg, the Apologist codex containing the only text of the early Epistle to Diognetus, and rare Renaissance books.
• September 17 – The first performance of Alexander Pushkin's play Boris Godunov is given at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg by members of the Alexandrinsky Theatre.
• c. September 20 – Friedrich Engels moves permanently to London from Manchester.
• December 18 – The Russian literary weekly Niva is first published by Adolf Marks in Saint Petersburg.
• unknown date – Construction of the David Sassoon Library in Bombay, India, is completed.

New books

Fiction

• William Harrison Ainsworth - Talbot Harland
• Thomas Bailey Aldrich – The Story of a Bad Boy
• Thomas Archer – The Terrible Sights of London
• Rhoda Broughton – Red as a Rose is She
• Wilkie Collins – Man and Wife
• Annie Denton Cridge - Man's Rights; Or, How Would You Like It? Comprising Dreams
• José Maria de Eça de Queiroz and Ramalho Ortigão –
• Charles Dickens – The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• Benjamin Disraeli – Lothair
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Eternal Husband
• Edward Jenkins – Ginx's Baby: his birth and other misfortunes
• Mór Jókai – Fekete gyémántok
• Aleksis Kivi – Seitsemän veljestä
• Jonas Lie – Den Fremsynte
• George Meredith – The Adventures of Harry Richmond
• William Morris – The Earthly Paradise
• Charles Reade - Put Yourself in His Place
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch – Venus in Furs
• Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin – The History of a Town
• Bayard Taylor – Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania
• Anthony Trollope – The Vicar of Bullhampton
• Ivan Turgenev – Stepnoy korol Lir ; novella, English translation: King Lear of the Steppes'
• Jules Verne – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
• Charlotte M. Yonge – ''The Caged Lion''

Children and young people

• John Neal — ''Great Mysteries and Little Plagues''

Drama

• James Albery – Two Roses
• Ludwig Anzengruber – Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld
• Henry James Byron – Uncle Dick's Darling
• Pietro Cossa – Nero
• Lydia Koidula
• *Maret ja Miina
• *Saaremaa Onupoeg
• Lord Newry – Ecarte
• George Sand and Sarah Bernhardt – L'Autre
• Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy – ''Tsar Boris''

Poetry

• Bret Harte – The Heathen Chinee
• Edward Lear – Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, including "The Owl and the Pussycat"
• Giovanni Marradi – Canzone moderne
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Poems, including "Jenny" and a fragment of "The House of Life"

Non-fiction

• J. E. Austen-Leigh – A Memoir of Jane Austen
• Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
• Richard William Church – Life of St. Anselm
• Thomas Wentworth Higginson - Army Life in a Black Regiment
• Hargrave Jennings – The Rosicrucians, their Rites and Mysteries
• Henry Maudsley – Body and Mind
• Dadabhai Naoroji – The Wants and Means of India
• William Robinson – The Wild Garden
• Charles Dudley Warner - ''My Summer in a Garden and Calvin, A Study of Character''

Births

• January 3 – Henry Handel Richardson, Australian novelist
• February 16 – Henric Streitman, Romanian essayist and journalist
• March 5 – Frank Norris, American novelist
• April 7 – Gustav Landauer, German philosopher and revolutionary
• June 25 – Erskine Childers, Irish novelist
• July 27 – Hilaire Belloc, French-born English writer, poet and satirist
• October 18 – Petre P. Negulescu, Romanian philosopher
• October 22 – Ivan Bunin, Russian-born writer, recipient of Nobel Prize in Literature
• October 29 – Gerald Duckworth, English publisher
• December 17 – Ioan A. Bassarabescu, Romanian short story writer and politician
• December 18 – Saki, English short story writer and dramatist

Deaths

• January 21 – Alexander Herzen, Russian writer
• February 25 – Henrik Hertz, Danish poet
• April 16 – Rallou Karatza, Greek Wallachian translator and theatrical promoter
• April 24 – Louisa Stuart Costello, Irish writer on history and travel
• June 9 – Charles Dickens, English novelist
• June 11 – William Gilmore Simms, American poet, novelist and historian
• June 24 – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Australian poet
• July 19 – Benjamin Thorpe, scholar of Old English
• July 20 – Jules de Goncourt, French novelist and critic
• July 24 – Anders Abraham Grafström, Swedish poet and historian
• July 30 - Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, Norwegian journalist and poet
• September 12 – Fitz Hugh Ludlow, American author and explorer
• September 23 - Prosper Mérimée, French writer
• November 4 – Comte de Lautreamont, French poet and writer
• December 5 – Alexandre Dumas, père, French novelist