1847 in literature

This article presents lists of literary events and publications in 1847.

Events

• January – Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero begins serial publication in Punch magazine (London), with the author, William Makepeace Thackeray, for the first time writing under his own name.
• March–April – Ivan Goncharov's debut novel A Common Story («Обыкновенная история», Obyknovennaya istorya) is published in Sovremennik (Saint Petersburg).
• April – Robert Browning settles with his wife and fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Florence.

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (who has painted himself out of the picture)

• June – Hans Christian Andersen begins his first visit to Britain during which he meets Charles Dickens.
• June 10 – Fictional date at the end of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, presumed to be that of the novel's completion.^[1]
• July – London publisher Thomas Cautley Newby accepts for publication Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey.^[1]
• August 7–24 – Charlotte Brontë completes the manuscript of Jane Eyre at Haworth and sends it to her publisher after he has rejected The Professor.^[2]
• September 16 – William Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon in England is bought by the United Shakespeare Company for preservation.^[3]
• October 19 – Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is published (as "an autobiography, edited by Currer Bell") in London by Smith, Elder & Co. in 3 volumes.^[1]
• November – Dmitry Grigorovich's anti-serfdom novel Anton Goremyka («Антон-горемыка», "Luckless Anton") is published in Sovremennik with its politically sensitive last scene rewritten by a censor.
• November 1 – John Maddison Morton's one-act farce Box and Cox (adapted from the French) opens at the Lyceum Theatre, London (under the new management of Madame Vestris and her husband Charles James Mathews) with John Pritt Harley and John Baldwin Buckstone in the title rôles.
• December 14 – Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey are published in a 3-volume set under the pen names of Ellis and Acton Bell respectively in London by T. C. Newby.^[4] Wuthering Heights will be Emily's only published novel as she dies aged 30 a year later.
• London publisher E. Churton brings out the first six of George Sand's books to be issued in English, the translations being by Matilda Hays, Eliza Ashurst and Rev. Edmund Larken.^[5]

New books

Fiction

• Honoré de Balzac – Le Cousin Pons
• Anne Brontë (as Acton Bell) – Agnes Grey
• Charlotte Brontë (as Currer Bell) – Jane Eyre
• Emily Brontë (as Ellis Bell) – Wuthering Heights
• Benjamin Disraeli – Tancred
• Alexandre Dumas – The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later (Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard; serialization begins; when published in English it is usually split into three parts, The Vicomte of Bragelonne, Louise de la Vallière and The Man in the Iron Mask, of which the last is the best known)
• Ivan Goncharov – A Common Story
• Catherine Gore – Castles in The Air
• Dmitry Grigorovich – Anton Goremyka
• Herman Melville – Omoo
• G. W. M. Reynolds – Faust: A Romance of the Secret Tribunals
• George Sand – Le Péché de M. Antoine ("The Sin of M. Antoine")
• The Sobieski Stuarts – Tales of the Century: or Sketches of the romance of history between the years 1746 and 1846
• Eugène Sue
  • Martin l'enfant trouvé ou Mémoires d'un valet de chambre ("Martin the Foundling", concludes publication)
  • Les Sept pêchés capitaux ("The Seven Deadly Sins", begins publication)
• William Makepeace Thackeray – Vanity Fair (serialisation)
• Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna – The System
• Anthony Trollope – The Macdermots of Ballycloran

Children and young people

• Frederick Marryat – The Children of the New Forest

Drama

• John Baldwin Buckstone
  • The Flowers of the Forest
  • The Green Bushes

Poetry

• Heinrich Heine – Atta Troll
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Evangeline
• Edgar Allan Poe – Ulalume
• Raja Ali Haji or his sister Saleha – Syair Abdul Muluk
• Christina Rossetti – Verses by Christina G. Rossetti
• Alfred Tennyson – The Princess

Non-fiction

• Hans Christian Andersen – The Fairy Tale of My Life (Das Märchen meines Lebens ohne Dichtung, autobiography)
• William Wells Brown – Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself
• Andrew Jackson Davis – The Principles of Nature
• Søren Kierkegaard – Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger)
• Karl Marx – The Poverty of Philosophy (Misère de la philosophie)
• William H. Prescott – A History of the Conquest of Peru

Births

• January 6 – Milovan Glišić, Serbian dramatist and translator (died 1908)
• January 9 – Oyyarathu Chandu Menon, Indian Malayalam-language novelist (died 1899)
• April 2 – Flora Annie Steel (Flora Annie Webster), English writer (died 1929)
• April 7 – Jens Peter Jacobsen, Danish novelist (died 1885)
• April 10 – Joseph Pulitzer, Hungarian American newspaperman (died 1911)
• August 20 – Bolesław Prus (Aleksander Głowacki), Polish novelist (died 1912)
• September 2 – George R. Sims, English writer (died 1922)
• September 22 – Alice Meynell (Alice Thompson), English poet (died 1922)
• November 8 – Bram Stoker, Irish novelist and theater manager (died 1912)
• December 26 – Hugh Conway, English novelist (died 1885)

Deaths

• February 8 – George Walker, English Gothic novelist (born 1772)
• May 4 – Alexandre Vinet, Swiss critic and theologian (born 1797)
• August 28 – Eugène Bourgeois, French dramatist (born 1818)
• September 16 – Grace Aguilar, English novelist (born 1816)
• October 13 – Johann Heinrich van Ess, German theologian (born 1772)

Awards

References