1856 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1856.

Events

• January 1 – M. H. Gill, printer to Dublin University, purchases the publishing and bookselling business of James McGlashan, renaming it McGlashan & Gill, the predecessor of Gill & Macmillan.
• March – Charles Dickens buys Gads Hill Place in Kent (England) from fellow novelist Eliza Lynn.
• March 1 – Lewis Carroll chooses his pseudonym; on May 1 he takes up photography as a hobby.
• March 5 – The second Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, is destroyed by fire (as the first was in 1808).
• July 19–26 – Wilkie Collins' "Anne Rodway", a short story in diary form in which the eponymous poor needlewoman investigates the murder of a friend assisted by her fiancé, is published in Household Words; it is the first English story in which a woman features as the main detective character.
• September 29 – English actor Henry Irving makes his stage début at Sunderland as Gaston, Duke of Orleans, in Bulwer Lytton's play Richelieu.
• October – Marian Evans (who has not yet adopted the pseudonym George Eliot) anonymously publishes a critical article "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" in the Westminster Review.
• October 1–December 15 – Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is serialized in Revue de Paris.
• November 6 – The first of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life and her first work of fiction, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton", is submitted to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine by G. H. Lewes for anonymous publication.
• November 18 – English-born actress Laura Keene opens her own theatre in New York City.
• November 20 – Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville meet when Hawthorne is United States consul in Liverpool.
• Mikhail Katkov revives the title The Russian Messenger (Russian: Ру́сский ве́стник Russkiy vestnik, Pre-reform Russian: Русскій Вѣстникъ Russkiy Vestnik) for an influential literary magazine published in Moscow. In its first year he publishes Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's Provincial Sketches (beginning in August, signed "N. Schedrin") and the text of Alexander Ostrovsky's play V chuzhom miru pohmelye ("Hangover at a Stranger's Feast"; premiered in Moscow on January 9).
• Arthur Schopenhauer adds a chapter on "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love" to the third edition of his The World as Will and Representation.
• Poet Juris Alunāns' Songs becomes the first significant published literary work in Latvian.
• English bookseller W. H. Smith first publishes the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship.
• Richard Francis Burton serves in the British Army in the Crimean War, becomes engaged to Isabel Arundel and sets off on an expedition to the African Great Lakes.
• Alphonse Daudet begins his teaching career.
• Henry Wallis exhibits his romantic painting of The Death of Chatterton in London with the young poet and novelist George Meredith posing as his 18th-century predecessor Thomas Chatterton.

New books

• Anonymous – Tit for Tat
• José de Alencar – Cinco minutos
• R. M. Ballantyne -The Young Fur-Traders
• Fredrika Bremer – Hertha
• William M. Burwell – White Acre vs. Black Acre
• Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. – The Gunmaker of Moscow; or, Vladimir, the Monk (serialization in New York Ledger)
• Wilkie Collins – The Dead Secret
• Mrs. Craik – John Halifax, Gentleman
• Charles Dickens and others – The Wreck of the Golden Mary
• Caroline Lee Hentz – Ernest Linwood
• Geraldine Jewsbury – The Sorrows of Gentility
• Gottfried Keller – Die Leute von Seldwyla
• Herman Melville
  • The Piazza Tales
  • I and My Chimney
• Eduard Mörike – Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag
• Charles Reade – It Is Never Too Late to Mend
• George Sand
  • Lucrezia Floriani
  • La Mare au diable
• Harriet Beecher Stowe – Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
• Leo Tolstoy – Youth
• Ivan Turgenev – Rudin
• Charlotte Mary Yonge – The Daisy Chain
• Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary

New drama

• Sava Dobroplodni – Mihal the Mouse-Eater (first authorised theatrical production in Bulgaria)
• Colin Henry Hazlewood – Jessie Vere, or the Return of the Wanderer
• Henrik Ibsen – Olaf Liljekrans
• Gustav Räder – Robert and Bertram

Poetry

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Aurora Leigh
• Victor Hugo – Les Contemplations
• See also 1856 in poetry

Non-fiction

• Alphonse Louis Constant - Rituel de la haute magie
• Lord Dufferin – Letters From High Latitudes
• Alexander Kinloch Forbes – Rasmala
• J. A. Froude – History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth (begins publication)
• Washington Irving – The Life of George Washington, Volume 3
• Hermann Lotze – Mikrokosmos
• Henry Morley – Cornelius Agrippa: The Life of Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Doctor and Knight, Commonly known as a Magician
• William Ridley – gurre kamilaroi
• Alexis de Tocqueville – L'Ancien régime et la révolution

Births

• January 9 – Lizette Woodworth Reese, poet (died 1935)
• February 14 – Frank Harris, Irish-born American journalist and memoirist (died 1931)
• April 5 – Booker T. Washington, African-American educator, author and orator (died 1915)
• May 15 – L. Frank Baum, American children's writer, novelist and poet (died 1919)
• July 25 – Charles Major, American novelist and lawyer (died 1913)
• July 26 – George Bernard Shaw, Irish dramatist and critic (died 1950)
• December 21 – Tomas O'Crohan, Irish Gaelic writer and fisherman (died 1937)
• Unknown date – Maria Cederschiöld, Swedish journalist and suffragette (died 1935)

Deaths

• January – James Baillie Fraser, Scottish travel writer (born 1783)
• February 17 – Heinrich Heine, German poet (born 1797)
• April 26 – Pyotr Chaadaev, Russian philosopher (born 1794)
• June 11 – Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, German philologist (born 1780)
• June 26 – Max Stirner, German philosopher (born 1806)
• June 27 – Joseph Meyer, German publisher and encyclopedist (born 1796)
• July 11 – Josef Kajetán Tyl, Czech dramatist and author of national anthem (born 1808)
• July 21 – Emil Aarestrup, Danish poet (born 1800)
• July 29 – Karel Havlíček Borovský, Czech poet, critic and publisher (tuberculosis, born 1821)
• August 24 – William Buckland, English theologian and antiquary (born 1784)
• August 30 – Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, English humorist (typhoid, born 1811)
• October 13 – Robert Christie, Canadian historian and journalist (born 1787)
• November 10 – Johann Kaspar Zeuss, German historian and philologist (born 1806)

Awards

• Newdigate Prize – William Powell James