1833 in literature

• January – The Knickerbocker is established by Charles Fenno Hoffman as The Knickerbacker: or, New-York monthly magazine.
• c. January – Richard Bentley (publisher) issues the first collected edition of Jane Austen's novels.
• February 16 – Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet begin a fifty-year affair. This is recorded in his novel Les Misérables (1862) as the date of Marius and Cosette's wedding night (Part V, Book 6, Chapter 1).
• March 16 – Parley's Magazine, an American periodical for young readers, publishes its first issue in Boston.
• March 25 – Edmund Kean, playing Othello to the Iago of his son, Charles Kean, collapses on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, and dies two months later.
• June 10 – The Dramatic Authors Act passed in the United Kingdom grants playwrights copyright in their work.
• Summer – George Sand and Alfred de Musset begin a two-year affair, recorded in their respective novels Elle et lui (1859) and La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (1836).
• September 15 – The English poet Arthur Henry Hallam, a close friend of Tennyson and engaged to be married to his sister Emily), dies suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in Vienna aged 22. This year Tennyson writes "Ulysses" in his memory (completed October 20; published in Poems of 1842), "Tithon" (an early version of "Tithonus") and "The Two Voices" (originally entitled "Thoughts of a Suicide"). He begins "Morte d'Arthur" (published 1842) and "Tiresias" (published 1885). In 1850 he will publish In Memoriam A.H.H.
• October 3 – The Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson marries the French composer Hector Berlioz in a civil ceremony at the British Embassy in Paris.
• December 1 – Charles Dickens' first published work of fiction, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", is the first item in what will become Sketches by Boz. It appears unsigned in the Monthly Magazine (London).

Uncertain dates

• Alphonse de Lamartine is elected a député of France.
• Publication begins in England of The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, edited by George Long.
• The first of the Bridgewater Treatises, examining science in relation to God, is published in England.[1]
• The first complete German translation of Shakespeare's plays appears: Shakespeares Dramatische Werke, by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck and his daughter Dorothea, and Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin.
• Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer's instructional text The Peep of Day, or, A series of the earliest religious instruction the infant mind is capable of receiving appears in England. It will sell a million copies in 38 languages.[2]
• The first printing press in Jerusalem is set up in the Armenian Quarter.[3]

• January 23 – Lewis Morris, Anglo-Welsh poet (died 1907)
• May 27 – Hester Martha Poole, American writer, poet, and art critic (died 1932)
• June 19 – Mary Tenney Gray, American editorial writer, club-woman, philanthropist, and suffragette (died 1904)
• July 9 – Florence Marryat, English novelist and entertainer (died 1899)
• August 9 – Emily Pepys, English child diarist (died 1877)
• August 12 – Lillie Devereux Blake, American writer and reformer (died 1913)
• August 20 – Vasile Pogor, Romanian poet, scholar and politician (died 1906)
• October 19 – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Australian poet, jockey and politician (died 1870)
• October 8 – Edmund Clarence Stedman, American poet and critic (died 1908)
• October 21 – Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor and entrepreneur, creator of the Nobel Prize (died 1896)
• November 2 – Horace Howard Furness, American Shakespearean scholar (died 1912)
• November 6 – Jonas Lie, Norwegian writer (died 1908)
• November 9 – Émile Gaboriau, French writer (died 1873)
• December 27 – Larin Paraske, Izhorian oral poet (died 1904)

• January 14 – Gottlob Ernst Schulze, German philosopher (born 1761)
• February 3 – Nikolay Gnedich, Russian poet and translator (born 1784)
• February 4 – John O'Keeffe, Irish dramatist (born 1747)
• March 7 – Rahel Varnhagen, German literary hostess (born 1771)
• March 11 – Franz Passow, German classicist and lexicographer (born 1786)
• April 13 – Elisa von der Recke, German poet (born 1754)
• May 10 – François Andrieux, French man of letters and dramatist (born 1759)
• May 15 – Edmund Kean, English Shakespearean actor (born 1787)
• August 25 – Jean-Louis Laya, French dramatist (born 1761)
• September 7 – Hannah More, English religious writer and philanthropist (born 1745)
• September 15 – Arthur Hallam, English poet (born 1811)
• October 4 – Maria Jane Jewsbury (Fletcher), English writer, poet and reviewer, dies in India (born 1800)