1859 in literature

The year 1859 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• George Eliot's novel Adam Bede is accused of being the "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and was consequently withdrawn from libraries.
• 30 April - Charles Dickens's new weekly magazine All the Year Round is published for the first time, succeeding Household Words.

New books

• R. M. Ballantyne -The World of Ice
• Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
• Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Village of Stepanchikovo
• George Eliot
  • Adam Bede
  • The Lifted Veil
• Ivan Goncharov - Oblomov
• Mary Jane Holmes - Dora Deane
• Hector Malot - Les Amants
• George Meredith - The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
• Viktor Rydberg - The Last Athenian
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - The Minister's Wooing
• Leo Tolstoy - Family Happiness
• Ivan Turgenev - Home of the Gentry (Дворянское гнездо)
• Harriet E. Wilson - Our Nig

New drama

• Dion Boucicault - The Octoroon
• Dinabandhu Mitra - Nil Darpan
• Alexander Ostrovsky - The Storm
• Aleksey Pisemsky - Gorkaya sudbina (A Bitter Fate)

Poetry

• See also 1859 in poetry
• Edward Fitzgerald -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
• Alfred Tennyson - Idylls of the King

Non-fiction

• Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
• William Henry Harvey - Phycologia Australica
• Washington Irving - The Life of George Washington, Volume 5
• Søren Kierkegaard - The Point of View of My Work as an Author (published posthumously; first full publication)
• Karl Marx - Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
• John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
• Samuel Smiles - Self Help

Births

• March 8 - Kenneth Grahame, children's author (died 1932)
• March 26 - A. E. Housman, poet (died 1936)
• May 2 - Jerome K. Jerome, humorous writer (died 1927)
• May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and prolific writer (died 1930)
• June 8 – Mary Cholmondeley, English writer (died 1925)
• August 4 - Knut Hamsun, Nobel-Prize-winning author (died 1952)
• September 26 - Irving Bacheller, journalist and writer (died 1950)
• October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature (died 1941)
• December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto (died 1917)

Deaths

• January 20 - Bettina von Arnim, novelist
• January 21 - Henry Hallam, historian
• February 13 - Eliza Acton, cookbook author
• April 14 - Lady Morgan, novelist
• April 16 - Alexis de Tocqueville, historian and political author
• April 29 - Dionysius Lardner, scientific writer
• July 23 - Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, poet
• September 2 - Delia Bacon, Shakespearean scholar
• October 4 - Karl Baedeker, publisher
• November 7 - Auguste Hilarion, politician and writer
• November 16 - William Spalding, literary critic
• November 20 - Mountstuart Elphinstone, historian
• November 28 - Washington Irving, author
• December 8 - Thomas de Quincey, opium-eating author
• December 16 - Wilhelm Grimm, collector of fairy-tales
• December 28 - Thomas Macaulay, poet, historian and politician

Awards