1839 in literature

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

Events

"The Last Scene", engraved by George Cruikshank in 1839 to illustrate William Harrison Ainsworth's serialised novel, *Jack Sheppard*. The caption reads: "Blueskin cutting down Jack Sheppard". In reality, Joseph "Blueskin" Blake was already dead by the time of Jack Sheppard's execution in 1724.

January 21 – Åbo Svenska Teater in Åbo (Turku), 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.^[1]
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".^[2]
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 (1811) is declared in a parliamentary report to be indecent.^[3]
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.^[4]
unknown dates
- Mikhail Lermontov publishes the first two parts of A Hero of Our Time (Герой нашего времени, Geroy nashevo vremeni) 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.^[5]^[6]
- 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 (It's Acceptable, translated as Sara Videbeck and the Chapel)
Honoré de Balzac
- Béatrix
- Illusions perdues, II: Un Grand homme de province à Paris (Lost Illusions, II: A Distinguished Provincial in Paris)
- Pierre Grassou
Nicolaas Beets (as Hildebrand) – 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 (serialization completed and in book form)
Alexandre Dumas – Captain Pamphile
Catherine Gore – The Cabinet Minister
Maurits Hansen – Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen (The Murder of Engine-maker Roolfsen)
Mikhail Lermontov - A Hero of Our Time (written)
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 (La Chartreuse de Parme)
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 (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Ny Samling. Andet Hefte) comprising "The Garden of Paradise" ("Paradisets have"), "The Flying Trunk" ("Den flyvende Kuffert") and "The Storks" ("Storkene")

Drama

Poetry

Philip James Bailey (anonymous) – Festus^[7]
Cláudio Manuel da Costa (posthumous) – Vila Rica
Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué (compiler) – Barzaz Breiz (Breton Ballads)
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 (died 1908)
January 26 – Mary Ann Maitland, Scottish-born Canadian author (died 1919)
February 1 – James Herne, American dramatist (died 1901)
February 22 – Francis Pharcellus Church, American editor and publisher (died 1906)
March 9 – Františka Stránecká, Czech writer and collector of Moravian folklore (died 1888)
March 16 – Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Literature (died 1907)
March 28 – Emily Lee Sherwood Ragan, American author and journalist (died 1918)^[8]
April 18 – Henry Kendall, Australian poet (died 1882)
June 21 – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian poet and novelist (died 1908)
June 22 – Clara Augusta Jones Trask, American dime novelist (died 1905)^[9]
July 5 – Helen Stuart Campbell, American author, editor, and reformer (died 1918)^[10]
July 11 – Kate Sanborn, American author and essayist (died 1917)
July 21 – Emma Rood Tuttle, American author and poet (died 1916)
August 4 – Walter Pater, English writer (died 1894)
August 9 – Gaston Paris, French writer and scholar (died 1903)
August 25 – Martha E. Cram Bates, American writer, journalist, and editor (died 1905)
September 10 – Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher (died 1914)
November 4 – S. M. I. Henry, American author, evangelist, and reformer (died 1900)
November 16 – William De Morgan (sic), English novelist and potter (died 1917)
November 29 – Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian dramatist (died 1889)
December 12 – Charlotte Frances Wilder, American writer (died 1916)
December 23 – Lucinda Barbour Helm, American author, editor, and activist (died 1897)

Deaths

January 16 – Edmund Lodge, English biographer and writer on heraldry (born 1756)
April 11 – John Galt, Scottish novelist and entrepreneur (born 1779)^[11]
April 13 – Robert Millhouse, English weaver poet (born 1788)
April 22 – Thomas Haynes Bayly, English poet, songwriter and dramatist (born 1797)
May 9 – Joseph Fiévée, French journalist, novelist, essayist and playwright (born 1767)
May 17 – Archibald Alison, Scottish author (born 1757)
May 21 – José María Heredia y Campuzano, Cuban poet (born 1803)
June 26 – Winifred Gales, English novelist and memoirist (born 1761)
August 3 – Dorothea von Schlegel, German novelist and translator (born 1764)
September 4 – Hermann Olshausen, German theologian (born 1796)
September 28 – William Dunlap, American dramatist (born 1766)
October 11 – Leonor de Almeida Portugal, 4th Marquise of Alorna, Portuguese noblewoman, painter, and poet (born 1750)^[12]
October 22 – Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet (born 1802)
unknown dates
- Elizabeth Dawbarn, English writer on religion and child care (year of birth not known)
- Mary Pilkington, English novelist, poet and children's writer (born 1761)^[13]

Awards

Newdigate prize – John Ruskin^[14]

References

↑ Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day. Tinsley Brothers. 1874. p. 9.
↑ David Schuyler (6 April 2012). Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909. Cornell University Press. p. 184. ISBN 978-0-8014-6470-6.
↑ Loveland, Ian (2000). Political Libels: A Comparative Study. Oxford: Hart Publishing. pp. 21–22. ISBN 1-84113-115-6.
↑ "Covent-Garden Theatre". The Times. London. 1839-10-01. p. 5. The manner in which it was played last night destroyed the brilliancy completely, and left a residuum of insipidity...
↑ Turville-Petre, Thorlac (1977). The Alliterative Revival. Woodbridge: Brewer. pp. 126–129. ISBN 0-85991-019-9.
↑ Burrow, J. A. (1971). Ricardian Poetry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 4–5. ISBN 0-7100-7031-4.
↑ Birley, Robert (1962). "Philip James Bailey, Festus". Sunk Without Trace: some forgotten masterpieces reconsidered. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. pp. 172–208.
↑ Leonard, John William; Marquis, Albert Nelson (1899). Who's who in America. Vol. 1 (Public domain ed.). Marquis Who's Who. p. 657.
↑ "Trask, Clara Augusta Jones". Northern Illinois University. Archived from the original on 26 July 2016. Retrieved 16 April 2017.
↑ Moe, Phyllis (1979). "Helen Stuart Campbell profile". In Mainiero, Lina (ed.). American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Vol. 1. New York, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. pp. 287–89.
↑ The English Cyclopædia: A New Dictionary of Universal Knowledge. Bradbury and Evans. 1856. p. 22.
↑ Avila e de Bolama, Antonio José de Avila (1916). A marqueza d'Alorna; algumas noticias authenticas para a historia da muito illustre e eminente escriptora que os poetas seus contemporaneos denominaram Alcipe. Lisboa Impr. de M.L. Torres. p. 52. Retrieved 24 March 2019.
↑ Book Builders LLC. (14 May 2014). Encyclopedia of British Writers, 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Infobase Publishing. pp. 191–192. ISBN 978-1-4381-0869-8.
↑ Edward T. Cook (1968). The Life of John Ruskin. Ardent Media. p. 68.

External links

Published 1839 Books at Goodreads
1839 Books at Goodreads

[1] Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day. Tinsley Brothers. 1874. p. 9.

[2] David Schuyler (6 April 2012). Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909. Cornell University Press. p. 184. ISBN 978-0-8014-6470-6.

[3] Loveland, Ian (2000). Political Libels: A Comparative Study. Oxford: Hart Publishing. pp. 21–22. ISBN 1-84113-115-6.

[4] "Covent-Garden Theatre". The Times. London. 1839-10-01. p. 5. The manner in which it was played last night destroyed the brilliancy completely, and left a residuum of insipidity...

[5] Turville-Petre, Thorlac (1977). The Alliterative Revival. Woodbridge: Brewer. pp. 126–129. ISBN 0-85991-019-9.

[6] Burrow, J. A. (1971). Ricardian Poetry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 4–5. ISBN 0-7100-7031-4.

[7] Birley, Robert (1962). "Philip James Bailey, Festus". Sunk Without Trace: some forgotten masterpieces reconsidered. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. pp. 172–208.

[8] Leonard, John William; Marquis, Albert Nelson (1899). Who's who in America. Vol. 1 (Public domain ed.). Marquis Who's Who. p. 657.

[9] "Trask, Clara Augusta Jones". Northern Illinois University. Archived from the original on 26 July 2016. Retrieved 16 April 2017.

[10] Moe, Phyllis (1979). "Helen Stuart Campbell profile". In Mainiero, Lina (ed.). American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. Vol. 1. New York, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. pp. 287–89.

[11] The English Cyclopædia: A New Dictionary of Universal Knowledge. Bradbury and Evans. 1856. p. 22.

[12] Avila e de Bolama, Antonio José de Avila (1916). A marqueza d'Alorna; algumas noticias authenticas para a historia da muito illustre e eminente escriptora que os poetas seus contemporaneos denominaram Alcipe. Lisboa Impr. de M.L. Torres. p. 52. Retrieved 24 March 2019.

[LLC.2014-13] Book Builders LLC. (14 May 2014). Encyclopedia of British Writers, 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Infobase Publishing. pp. 191–192. ISBN 978-1-4381-0869-8.

[14] Edward T. Cook (1968). The Life of John Ruskin. Ardent Media. p. 68.

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