1863 in literature

List of years in literature (table)
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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1863.

Events

• January 1 - Essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorates today's Emancipation Proclamation in the United States by composing "Boston Hymn" and surprising a crowd of 3,000 with its debut reading at Boston Music Hall.
• January 31 - Jules Verne's novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen (Cinq semaines en ballon) is published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel in Paris; it will be the first of Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires.
• February 3 - Mark Twain at the Territorial Enterprise: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, signing a humorous letter to the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada, first uses the pen name Mark Twain.
• June 12 - The Arts Club is founded by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Frederic Leighton and others in London's Mayfair as a social meeting place for those involved or interested in the creative arts.
• June 13 - Samuel Butler's dystopian article "Darwin among the Machines" is published (as by "Cellarius") in The Press newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand; it will be incorporated into his novel Erewhon (1872).
• December 29 - An estimated 7000 people attend the funeral of William Makepeace Thackeray at Kensington Gardens in London, and nearly 2000 are at his burial in Kensal Green Cemetery.
• Mendele Mocher Sforim publishes his first Yiddish language story, "Dos Kleine Menshele" ("The Little Man"), in the Odessa weekly Kol Mevasser.
• Establishment in Iași of the Romanian Junimea literary society, a group which will exercise a major influence on Romanian culture until the 1910s.
• Elvira, or the Love of a Tyrant, a novel by the Neapolitan author Giuseppe Folliero de Luna, becomes the first to be published in the Maltese language, as Elvira Jew Imħabba ta’ Tirann.
• Publication of The Works of William Shakespeare (the "Cambridge Shakespeare"), edited by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright, published by Macmillan and printed by Cambridge University Press, begins in Britain.

New books

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon
  • Aurora Floyd
  • Eleanor's Victory
• Nikolai Chernyshevsky - What Is to Be Done? (Что делать?, Shto delat'?)
• George Eliot - Romola
• "Charles Felix" (probably Charles Warren Adams) - The Notting Hill Mystery (serialization completed and in book form; considered the first full-length detective novel in English)
• Elizabeth Gaskell - Sylvia's Lovers
• Théophile Gautier - Capitan Fracassa
• Edward Everett Hale - The Man Without a Country
• Mary Jane Holmes - Marian Grey
• Julia Kavanagh - Queen Mab
• Charles Kingsley - The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (complete in book form)
• Sheridan Le Fanu - The House by the Churchyard
• Mrs Oliphant - Salem Chapel, first of The Chronicles of Carlingford (in book form)
• Ouida - Held in Bondage
• Charles Reade - Very Hard Cash
• Miguel Riofrío - La Emancipada (the first Ecuadorian novel)
• Leo Tolstoy - The Cossacks (Казаки, Kazaki)
• John Townsend Trowbridge - Cudjo's Cave
• Giovanni Verga - Sulle Lagune ("In the Lagoons")
• Jules Verne - Five Weeks in a Balloon
• Jean Ingelow - "The Prince's Dream"

New drama

• W. S. Gilbert - Uncle Baby
• Tom Taylor - The Ticket-of-Leave Man

Poetry

• Lizzie Doten - Poems from the Inner Life (alleged to have been dictated by the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Tales of a Wayside Inn, including "Paul Revere's Ride"

Non-fiction

• William Barnes - Glossary of Dorset Dialect
• Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons.
• William Wells Brown - The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements
• Francis James Child - Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
• William Howitt - History of the Supernatural
• Fanny Kemble - Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839
• Charles Lyell - Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man
• Ernest Renan - The Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus)

Births

• February 9 – Anthony Hope (Anthony Hope Hawkins), English novelist and playwright (died 1933)
• March 3 – Arthur Machen (Arthur Llewellyn Jones), Welsh novelist and short story writer (died 1947)
• March 12 – Gabriele D'Annunzio, Italian poet (died 1938)
• April 9 – Henry De Vere Stacpoole, Irish novelist (died 1951)
• April 29 – Constantine Cavafy, Greek Alexandrine poet (died 1933)
• August 7 – Gene Stratton Porter, American novelist and naturalist (died 1924)
• September 1 – Violet Jacob (Violet Kennedy-Erskine), Scottish historical novelist and poet (died 1946)
• September 8 – W. W. Jacobs, English short story writer (died 1943)
• September 22 – Ferenc Herczeg (Franz Herzog), Hungarian dramatist (died 1954)
• November 1 – Arthur Morrison, English writer (died 1945)
• November 18 – Richard Dehmel, German poet (died 1920)
• November 21 – Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Q.), English novelist and anthologist (died 1944)
• December 16 – George Santayana, American novelist and poet (died 1952)

Deaths

• May 13 – August Hahn, German Protestant theologian (born 1792)
• July 3 – William Barksdale, American journalist and Confederate general (killed in action, born 1821
• July 10 – Clement Clarke Moore, American classicist and poet (born 1779)
• September 17 – Alfred de Vigny, French poet, dramatist and novelist (born 1797)
• September 20 – Jacob Grimm, German philologist and fairy-tale author (born 1785)
• October 6 – Frances Trollope, English novelist (born 1779)
• October 8 – Richard Whately, English theologian and archbishop (born 1787)
• December 13 – Christian Friedrich Hebbel, German poet and dramatist (born 1813)
• December 17 – Émile Saisset, French philosopher (born 1814)
• December 24 – William Makepeace Thackeray, Indian-born English novelist and travel writer (stroke, born 1811)