1816 in literature

Events

• April – Lord Byron leaves England for good to tour continental Europe.
• April 14 – Lord Byron's poems "A Sketch from Private Life" and "Fare Thee Well", about his separation from his wife Anne Isabella, are published without authority in The Champion.
• May – Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon is the first book published independently by Henry Colburn in London. A roman à clef, it contains an unflattering portrait of her ex-lover Lord Byron in the rakish title character of Lord Glenarvon and provokes Purity of Heart; Or, The Ancient Costume: A Tale, in One Volume, Addressed to the Author of Glenarvon, "a virulent, polemical novel" by "An old wife of twenty years", actually clergyman's spouse Elizabeth Thomas.
• July – Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Polidori, who have gathered at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in a rainy Switzerland in this 'Year Without a Summer', tell each other tales. This spawns to two classic Gothic narratives, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre. Byron also writes the poem Darkness. In late August Shelley and Godwin return to England, taking with them some of Byron's manuscripts for his publisher.
• September 16
• *Lord Byron's Monody on the Death of the Right Honourable R. B. Sheridan, written at the request of Douglas Kinnaird, is spoken at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London by Mrs. Maria Davison.
• *Actor William Macready makes his London debut at Covent Garden, as Orestes in The Distressed Mother, a translation of Racine's Andromaque made by Ambrose Philips.
• October
• *Charles Wentworth Dilke and his friend Charles Armitage Brown take up residence at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, then on the northern edge of London.
• *John Keats writes his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
• November 25 – The Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia becomes the world's first to be lit by gas.
• December – John Keats composes the poem "Sleep and Poetry" while staying at the Hampstead house of his friend Leigh Hunt, who introduces him to Shelley.
• December 5 – Lord Byron's The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems is published in London. John Murray, his publisher, is able to sell 7,000 copies of this and of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III to booksellers at a dinner this month.
• December 30 – Percy Bysshe Shelley marries his mistress Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, after the suicides on October 9 of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and on December 10 of his pregnant estranged first wife, Harriet.

• Publication in Mexico of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's comic picaresque novel The Mangy Parrot: The Life and Times of Periquillo Sarniento written by himself for his children in installments, generally seen as the first novel written and published in Latin America, although government censorship prevents the final chapters from being published until the 1830s.
• Shakespeare's Hamlet is for the first time performed at the castle of Kronborg in Helsingør, where it is set.
• Therese Huber begins to edit Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände in Tübingen.

  New books

Fiction

• Thomas Ashe – The Soldier of Fortune
• Sarah Burney – Tales of Fancy: The Shipwreck
• Benjamin Constant – Adolphe
• Selina Davenport – The Original of the Miniature
• Stéphanie Félicité, Comtesse de Genlis – Jane of France
• Jane Harvey – Brougham Castle
• Ann Hatton – Chronicles of an Illustrious House
• Barbara Hofland – The Maid of Moscow
• Leigh Hunt – The Story of Rimini
• Frances Margaretta Jacson – Rhoda
• Henry Gally Knight – Ilderim, a Syrian Tale
• Caroline Lamb – Glenarvon
• Alicia Le Fanu – Strathallan
• José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi – The Mangy Parrot
• Emma Parker – Self-deception
• David William Paynter – Godfrey Ranger
• Walter Scott
• *The Antiquary
• *The Black Dwarf
• *Old Mortality

  Children

• François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil – Jean et Jeannette, ou les Petits aventuriers parisiens
• E. T. A. Hoffmann – ''Nussknacker und Mausekönig

  Drama

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Zapolya
• Bernhard Severin Ingemann – Reinald Underbarnet
• Charles Maturin – Bertram; or The Castle of St. Aldobrand

  Poetry

• Lord Byron
• *Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III
• *Prometheus
• *The Siege of Corinth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – "Christabel"; "Kubla Khan: A Vision" ; "The Pains of Sleep"
• John Keats – "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• *Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude
• *Mont Blanc

  Non-fiction

• Franz Bopp – Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Statesman's Manual; or, The Bible the best guide to political skill and foresight: a lay sermon
• John Hoyland – A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, and Present State of the Gypsies
• Nikolay Karamzin – History of the Russian State
• George Sinclair – Hortus gramineus Woburnensis

  Births

• February 18 – Ferdinand Dugué, French poet and playwright
• March 1 – Kawatake Mokuami, Japanese kabuki dramatist
• April 1 – Peter Cunningham, British literary scholar and antiquarian
• April 21 – Charlotte Brontë, English novelist and poet
• June 2 – Grace Aguilar, English novelist
• September 16 – Theodore Martin, Scottish poet, biographer and translator
• September 20 – Fredrik August Dahlgren, Swedish dramatist and songwriter
• November 1 – Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer, German novelist, dramatist and travel writer
• November 28 – Theodosia Trollope, English poet and translator

  Deaths

• February 22 – Adam Ferguson, Scottish philosopher
• March 3 – Johann August von Starck, German writer and theologian
• July 7 – Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Irish playwright and politician
• July 23 – Elizabeth Hamilton, Irish-born Scottish essayist, poet and novelist
• September 9 – Eliza Fay, English letter-writer and traveler
• October 27 – Santō Kyōden, Japanese fiction writer, poet and artist