1802 in literature

• April 15 – William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth walk by Ullswater and see a belt of daffodils, which inspires his poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", written two years later.[1]
• April 19 – Joseph Grimaldi first presents his white-faced clown character "Joey", at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London.[2]
• Summer – Adam Oehlenschläger writes at one sitting the poem "Guldhornene", introducing Romanticism into Danish poetry.[3]
• July 31 – William Wordsworth, leaving London for Dover and Calais with Dorothy, witnesses an early morning scene he captures in a Petrarchan sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge". In Calais, he will meet his 9-year-old illegitimate daughter Caroline for the first time.
• October 4 – William Wordsworth marries Mary Hutchinson at Brompton, Scarborough.
• October 10 – The Edinburgh Review, a reforming quarterly, is first published.
• November 13 – The first play in English explicitly called a melodrama ("mélodrame") is performed in London: Thomas Holcroft's Gothic A Tale of Mystery (an unacknowledged translation of de Pixerécourt's Cœlina, ou, l'enfant du mystère), at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.[4]
• November 15 – Washington Irving makes a first appearance in print at the age of nineteen, with observational letters to the New York Morning Chronicle under the name Jonathan Oldstyle.
• December 2–3 – Jane Austen accepts, then rejects, a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither at his Hampshire home.[5]

Uncertain dates

• Henry Boyd completes the first full English translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.
• Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron publishes Oupneck'hat in Latin, the first translation of the Upanishads into a Western language.
• The first part of Jippensha Ikku's picaresque novel Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige (東海道中膝栗毛, Shank's Mare) is published in Japan.

• January 9 – Catharine Parr Traill, English-Canadian memoirist and children's author (died 1899)
• February 11 – Lydia Maria Child, American abolitionist, activist, novelist, and journalist (died 1880)
• February 26 – Victor Hugo, French novelist and poet (died 1885)
• June 2 – Karl Lehrs, German classicist (died 1878)
• June 12 – Harriet Martineau, English social theorist (died 1876)
• July 10 – Robert Chambers, Scottish writer and publisher (died 1871)
• July 24 – Alexandre Dumas, père, French novelist (died 1870)
• July 28 – Winthrop Mackworth Praed, English poet (died 1839)
• August 14 - Letitia Elizabeth Landon, English poet and novelist (died 1838)
• August 25 – Nikolaus Lenau, Hungarian-born German poet (died 1850)
• November 29 – Wilhelm Hauff, German poet and novelist (died 1827)
• December 8 – Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet (died 1839)
• December 23 – Sara Coleridge, English poet and translator (died 1852)
• December 31 – Richard Henry Horne, English poet, critic and journalist, and public official in Australia (died 1884)

• February 26 – Alexander Geddes, Scottish theologian, scholar and priest (born 1737)
• April 18 – Erasmus Darwin, English poet and natural philosopher (born 1731)
• June 5 – Johann Christian Gottlieb Ernesti, German classicist (born 1756)
• June 20 – Sophia Burrell, English poet and dramatist (born 1753)
• June 29 – Johann Jakob Engel, German teacher and writer (born 1741)
• August 10 – Franz Aepinus, German natural philosopher (born 1724)
• December 27 – Thomas Cadell, English bookseller and publisher (born 1742)
• Unknown date – John Pope, American soldier and travel writer (born 1749)