1869 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1869.

Events

• February 3 – Booth's Theatre opens on Manhattan with the owner, Edwin Booth, playing the male lead in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
• May 22 – Serial publication of Anthony Trollope's novel He Knew He Was Right concludes and it is issued in London as a book, the first to include a fictional private investigator, ex-policeman Samuel Bozzle (in a case of marital breakdown).
• August
  • Ambrose Bierce, writing a satirical column for the San Francisco News Letter, begins to produce the cynical definitions which will eventually become The Devil's Dictionary.
  • Macmillan Publishing opens its first American office in New York City, headed by George Edward Brett.^[1]
• October 5 – Model, poet and artist Elizabeth Siddal (d. 1862) is exhumed at Highgate Cemetery in London in order to recover the manuscript of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poems buried with her.
• December – Publication of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace («Война и миръ», Voyna i mir) complete in book form concludes. It is printed in Moscow and sold by the author on subscription.^[2]
• As a protest against her drama school having been closed down by the Russian authorities, Swedish-born actress Hedvig Raa-Winterhjelm delivers the lines in her next performance, Aleksis Kivi's Lea, in the Finnish language, the first time this has been spoken in the public theater in Finland.

New books

Births

• January 15 – Stanisław Wyspiański, Polish dramatist, poet, painter and architect (died 1907)
• February 8 – Victor Ido, born Hans van de Wall, Dutch East Indian journalist, novelist and playwright (died 1948)
• February 11 – Else Lasker-Schüler, German-born poet, playwright and short story writer (died 1945)
• March 11 – F. G. Loring, English writer and naval officer (died 1951)
• March 14 – Algernon Blackwood, English writer (died 1951)
• May 10 – Rachel Davis Harris, African American librarian (died 1969)
• May 23 – Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, American poet (died 1944)
• June 10 – Arthur Shearly Cripps, English-born poet, short story writer and Anglican priest in Africa (died 1952)
• July 1 – William Strunk, Jr., American professor of English (died 1946)
• July 8 – William Vaughn Moody, American dramatist and poet (died 1910)
• July 29 – Booth Tarkington, American novelist (died 1946)
• August 10 – Laurence Binyon, English poet and scholar (died 1943)
• October 6 – Bo Bergman, Swedish poet (died 1967)
• November 15 – Charlotte Mew, English poet (suicide, 1928)
• November 20 – Zinaida Gippius, Russian writer (died 1945)
• November 22 – André Gide, French writer (died 1951)
• December 22 – Edwin Arlington Robinson, American poet (died 1935)
• December 30 – Stephen Leacock, English-born Canadian humorist and economist (died 1944)

Deaths

• January 20 – Carl Wilhelm Göttling, German classical commentator (born 1793)^[3]
• January 30 – William Carleton, Irish writer (born 1794)
• February 15 – Ghalib, Indian poet (born 1796)
• February 28 – Alphonse de Lamartine, French poet and politician (born 1790)
• May 18 – Peter Cunningham, British literary scholar and antiquarian (born 1816)
• July 19 – Victor Aimé Huber, German travel writer and literary historian (born 1800)
• August 2 – Thomas Medwin, English poet, biographer and translator (born 1788)
• October 18 – Simon Jenko, Slovene poet (born 1835)
• November 3 – Andreas Kalvos, Greek Romantic poet and dramatist (born 1792)

References