1866 in literature

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The year 1866 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

• Ludwig Anzengruber returns to Vienna after working as a travelling actor.
• Luigi Capuana becomes theatre critic for Italian newspaper The Nation.
• Two new American magazines for children, The Little Corporal and Children's Hour, publish their first issues.

New books

• R. D. Blackmore - Cradock Nowell
• Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay -Kapalkundala
• Wilkie Collins - Armadale
• John Esten Cooke - Surry of Eagle's-Nest
• Alphonse Daudet - Lettres de mon moulin
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Crime and Punishment
  • The Gambler
• Alexandre Dumas, fils - L'Affaire Clemenceau
• George Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical
• John William De Forest - Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
• Émile Gaboriau - The Lerouge Affair
• Victor Hugo - Les Travailleurs de la Mer ("The Toilers of the Sea")
• George MacDonald - Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood
• Margaret Oliphant - Miss Marjoribanks
• Ouida - Chandos
• Anthony Trollope - Nina Balatka (published anonymously initially - Trollope was interested in discovering whether his books sold on their own merits or as a consequence of the author's name and reputation)
• José Milla y Vidaurre - La Hija del Adelantado

New drama

• Dion Boucicault - Rip van Winkle or The Sleep of Twenty Years
• Alexandre Dumas, fils - Heloise Paranquet
• Henrik Ibsen - Brand

Poetry

• Algernon Charles Swinburne - Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)
• Paul Verlaine - Poèmes saturniens

Non-fiction

• William Wells Brown - The Negro in the American Rebellion
• Friedrich Albert Lange - Geschichte des Materialismus
• Charles Haddon Spurgeon - The Wordless Book

Births

• January 29 - Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize winning author, (+ 1944)
• February 24 - Cyril Arthur Pearson, publisher (+ 1921)
• July 28 - Beatrix Potter, Children's author (+ 1943)
• May 2 - Paul Kretschmer, linguist (+ 1956)
• September 7 - Tristan Bernard, writer (+ 1947)
• August 31 - Elizabeth von Arnim, novelist (+ 1941)
• September 21 - H. G. Wells, science fiction and romantic novelist (+ 1946)
• November 21 - Dusé Mohamed Ali, political activist, journalist and dramatist (+ 1945)
• date unknown - Dora Sigerson Shorter, poet (+ 1918)

Deaths

• January 23 - Thomas Love Peacock, satirist
• February 2 - Francois Xavier Garneau, poet and historian
• March 6 - William Whewell, philosopher and theologian
• March 29 - John Keble, poet
• June 16 - Joseph Méry, satirist and librettist
• August 1 - Luigi Carlo Farini, historian
• August 12 - Philip Stanhope Worsley, poet
• September 10 - Charles Maclaren, first editor of The Scotsman
• September 14 - Léon Gozlan, novelist and dramatist
• September 19 - Christian Hermann Weisse, philosopher

Awards