1849 in literature

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The year 1849 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• La Tribune des Peuples, a pan-European romantic nationalist periodical, is published between March and November by Adam Mickiewicz.
• Who's Who is published for the first time.
• Honoré de Balzac travels to Poland to meet Eveline Hanska, whom he will marry shortly before his death.
• Philip Massinger's play Believe as You List receives its first publication, 218 years after its theatrical premier.
• Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail-Coach appears in the October and December issues of Blackwood's Magazine.
• November 14 - A public festival is held in Denmark to celebrate the 70th birthday of Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger.

New books

• William Harrison Ainsworth - The Lancashire Witches
• Charlotte Brontë - Shirley
• François-René de Chateaubriand - Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
• Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
• Fyodor Dostoevsky - Netochka Nezvanova
• Alexandre Dumas, père - The Queen's Necklace
• Catherine Gore - The Diamond and the Pearl
• Charles Kingsley - Alton Locke
• Herman Melville
  • Mardi
  • Redburn
• Mayne Reid - The Rifle Rangers
• G. W. M. Reynolds - The Bronze Statue
• George Sand - Little Fadette
• James Anthony Froude - The Nemesis of Faith

New drama

• Christian Friedrich Hebbel - Der Rubin
• Gaspar Núñez de Arce - Amor y Orgullo
• Eugène Scribe - Adrienne Lecouvreur

Poetry

• Matthew Arnold - The Strayed Reveller
• Edgar Allan Poe - Annabel Lee, Eldorado, The Bells

Non-fiction

• John Mitchell Kemble - History of the Saxons in England
• Francis Parkman - The Oregon Trail
• John Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture
• Henry David Thoreau - Resistance to Civil Government
• George Ticknor - A History of Spanish Literature
• Søren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death

Births

• January 22 - August Strindberg, Swedish dramatist (died 1912)
• February 18 - Alexander Kielland, Norwegian novelist (died 1906)
• July 22 - Emma Lazarus, poet (died 1887)
• August 23 - William Henley, British poet (died 1903)
• October 7 - James Whitcomb Riley, poet (died 1916)
• November 24 - Frances Hodgson Burnett, children's writer (died 1924)

Deaths

• January 6 - Hartley Coleridge, poet and critic
• February 8 - France Prešeren, poet
• May 22 - Maria Edgeworth, novelist
• May 28 - Anne Brontë, novelist and poet
• July 7 - Goffredo Mameli, poet
• July 25 - James Kenney, dramatist
• October 7 - Edgar Allan Poe, poet, short story writer, and critic

Awards