1810 in literature

• February – The eccentric English amateur actor Robert Coates makes his début in a favourite role: Romeo, at the Theatre Royal, Bath.
• April 10 – Percy Bysshe Shelley matriculates at University College, Oxford. His atheistic Gothic novella Zastrozzi: A Romance, written while still a schoolboy at Eton, is published this year under his initials in London. Its successor, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance, is published as "By a Gentleman of the University of Oxford" in December (dated 1811) in London by J. J. Stockdale. In September, Shelley publishes through Stockdale Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, co-written with his sister Elizabeth before he came up to Oxford, but withdrawn due to plagiarism of one poem. In November he and a friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, publish the burlesque Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; Being Poems found amongst the Papers of that Noted Female who attempted the Life of the King in 1786 "Edited by John Fitzvictor" in Oxford.[1]

Uncertain dates

• Germaine de Staël's study of Germany De l'Allemagne is published in Paris but suppressed by order of Napoleon.
• A collection, The British Novelists, with an introductory essay and prefaces by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, appears in 50 volumes in London from F. C. & J. Rivington.

• February 10 – Giulietta Pezzi, Italian novelist, journalist, and poet (died 1878)
• May 10 – E. Cobham Brewer, English lexicographer (died 1897)
• May 11 – Caroline Fox, English diarist (died 1870)
• May 23 – Margaret Fuller American feminist writer (drowned 1850)
• August 6 – William Ticknor, American publisher (died 1864)
• August 31 – František Doucha, Czech writer and translator (died 1884)
• September 22 – John Brown, Scottish physician and essayist (died 1882)
• September 29 – Elizabeth Gaskell, English novelist (died 1865)
• December 11 – Alfred de Musset, French poet (died 1857)

• February 9 – Richard Chandler, English antiquary (born 1738)
• February 22 – Charles Brockden Brown, American novelist (tuberculosis, born 1771)
• March 14 – Ludwig Timotheus Spittler, German historian (born 1752)
• April 3 – Twm o'r Nant, Welsh-language dramatist and poet (born 1739)
• May 1 – Christoph Meiners, German philosopher (born 1747)
• May 17 – Robert Tannahill, Scottish poet (born 1774)
• December 15 – Sarah Trimmer, English children's writer and critic (born 1741)