1820 in literature - Definition and Overview

See also: 1819 in literature, other events of 1820, 1821 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• Robert Chambers's publishing company publishes The Songs of Robert Burns.
• November 20 - An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story).

New Books

• The Abbot - Sir Walter Scott
• Castle of Nielo - Robert Huish
• The Crusaders - Louisa Stanhope
• Essays of Elia - Charles Lamb
• The Eve of St. Agnes - John Keats
• Forty Years ago - Thomas Gaspey
• The Highland Castle, and the Lowland Cottage - Rosalia St. Clair
• Italian Mysteries - Francis Lathom
• Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott
• Lamia and Other Poems - John Keats
• Life of Wesley - Robert Southey
• Melmoth the Wanderer - Charles Robert Maturin
• The Munster Cottage Boy - Regina Marie Roche
• Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery - John Clare
• Prometheus Unbound (poetry) - Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Ruslan and Ludmila - Alexander Pushkin
• The Songs of Robert Burns - Robert Burns
• The Spectre of Lanmere Abbey - Sarah Wilkinson

Births

• January 17 - Anne Brontë, author (+ 1849)
• March 30 - Anna Sewell, author (+ 1878)
• April 26 - Alice Cary, American poet and short-story writer
• November 28 - Friedrich Engels, socialist writer (+ 1895)

Deaths

Awards