1839 in literature

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The year 1839 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• Washington Irving begins contributing regularly to The Knickerbocker, and will publish thirty new pieces in the magazine — including "The Creole Village," in which he will coin the phrase "the almighty dollar" — through March 1841.
• John Roberton's pseudo-medical work On Diseases of the Generative System (1811) is declared to be indecent and becomes the centre of the important British constitutional case of Stockdale v. Hansard.

New fiction

• William Harrison Ainsworth - Jack Sheppard
• Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickleby
• Frederick Marryat -
  • Diary in America
  • The Phantom Ship
• Harriet Martineau - Deerbrook
• Edgar Allan Poe -
  • "The Fall of the House of Usher"
  • "William Wilson"
• Jules Sandeau - Marianna
• Stendhal - The Charterhouse of Parma
• Philip Meadows Taylor - Confessions of a Thug

New drama

• Felicia Hemans - De Chatillon

Poetry

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -
  • Hyperion
  • Voices of the Night

Non-fiction

• Louis Blanc - L'Organisation du Travail
• Charles Darwin - The Voyage of the Beagle
• George W. M. Reynolds - Grace Darling; or, the Heroine of the Ferne Islands
• Jared Sparks - Life of Washington
• John Tallis - Tallis Directory

Births

• January 7 - Ouida, English novelist (died 1908)
• February 1 - James Herne, American dramatist (died 1901)
• February 22 - Francis Pharcellus Church, American editor and publisher (died 1906)
• March 16 - Sully Prudhomme, French poet and essayist, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Literature (died 1907)
• April 18 - Henry Kendall, Australian poet (died 1882)
• June 21 - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian poet and novelist (died 1908)
• August 4 - Walter Pater, English writer (died 1894)
• August 9 - Gaston Paris, French writer and scholar (died 1903)
• September 10 - Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher (died 1914)
• November 29 - Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian dramatist (died 1889)

Deaths

• April 11 - John Galt, Scottish novelist (born 1779)
• May 17 - Archibald Alison, Scottish author (born 1757)
• May 21 - José María Heredia y Campuzano, Cuban poet (born 1803)
• September 4 - Hermann Olshausen, German theologian (born 1796)
• October 22 - Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet (born 1802)

Awards

• Newdigate prize - John Ruskin