1859 in literature - Definition and Overview

See also: 1858 in literature, other events of 1859, 1860 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• The book, Adam Bede by George Eliot, was accused of being the "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" in Britain and was consequently withdrawn from libraries.

New Books

• Adam Bede - George Eliot
• Les Amants - Hector Malot
• Dora Deane - Mary Jane Holmes
• The Idylls of the King - Alfred Lord Tennyson
• The Last Athenian - Viktor Rydverg
• Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov
• On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
• The Ordeal of Richard Feverel - George Meredith
• Rocambole - Pierre Ponson
• The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (poetry) - Edward Fitzgerald
• A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
• The World of Ice - RM Ballantyne

Births

• June 8 – Mary Cholmondeley, English writer (d. 1925)
• March 8 - Kenneth Grahame (+ 1932)
• May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (+ 1930)
• October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature
• December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto

Deaths

• November 28 - Washington Irving, author
• December 28 - Thomas Macaulay, poet, historian and politician

Awards