1823 in literature

Events

• February 7 – The Bannatyne Club is inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott and others as a text publication society to print by subscription rare texts on the history, literature and traditions of Scotland.
• October – Thomas De Quincey's classic essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" appears in this month's issue of The London Magazine.
• May 23 – Russian writer Alexander Pushkin begins work on his verse novel Eugene Onegin.
• December – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, suffering from opium addiction, moves to No. 3, The Grove, Highgate, a house owned by Dr James Gillman.
• December 23 – Clement Clarke Moore's poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas is published anonymously in the Troy, New York, Sentinel, and introduces the eponym "Santa Claus".
• Unknown dates
• *Discovery of the 1603 First Quarto edition of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, by Sir Henry Bunbury, causes scholarly excitement.
• *London actor Edmund Kean reinstates in performance the original, tragic ending of Shakespeare's play King Lear, not generally used since 1681, although it is not well received.
• *The London publisher C. Baldwyn brings out the first English translation of Grimms' Fairy Tales as German Popular Stories. Translated from the Kinder und Haus Märchen collected by MM. Grimm from Oral Tradition. The anonymous translations were made by two lawyers, Edgar Taylor and David Jardine, and the illustrations by George Cruikshank, who is beginning to focus on this medium.

  New books

Fiction

• Willibald Alexis – Walladmor
• James Fenimore Cooper – The Pioneers
• Claire de Duras – Ourika
• John Galt
• *The Entail, or The Lairds of Grippy
• *The Gathering of the West
• *Ringan Gilhaize, or The Covenanters
• *The Spaewife: a tale of the Scottish chronicles
• Thomas Gaspey – Monks of Leadenhead
• Sarah Green – The Nieces
• Jane Harvey – Mountalyth
• William Hazlitt – Liber Amoris
• Victor Hugo – Han d'Islande
• Grace Kennedy – Father Clement
• Caroline Lamb – Ada Reis
• John Gibson Lockhart – Reginald Dalton
• Mary Meeke – What Shall Be, Shall Be
• John Neal – Logan
• James Kirke Paulding – Koningsmarke, the Long Finne
• Sir Walter Scott
• *Peveril of the Peak
• *Quentin Durward
• *St. Ronan's Well
• Mary Shelley – Valperga
• John Wilson – The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay

  Children and young people

• Mrs Markham – A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the End of the Reign of George III

  Drama

• Aleksander Griboyedov – Woe from Wit
• Franz Grillparzer – König Ottokars Glück und Ende
• Mary Russell Mitford – Julian: a tragedy
• Richard Brinsley Peake – Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein
• Eugène Scribe
• *L'Héritière
• *Le Menteur Veridique

  Poetry

• Thomas Campbell –
• Alphonse de Lamartine – Nouvelles méditations poétiques
• Adam Mickiewicz – Grażyna
• Henry Neele – Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – Posthumous Poems

  Non-fiction

• Alexandre Bertrand – Traité du somnambulisme
• William Buckland – Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, or, Observations on the Organic Remains attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge
• Lorenzo Da Ponte – Memorie
• Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases – Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène
• John Franklin – Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea
• Ethan Smith – View of the Hebrews

  Births

• January 1 – Sándor Petőfi, Hungarian poet and revolutionary
• February 28 – Ernest Renan, French philosopher and writer
• March 20 – Ned Buntline
• April 6 – Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney, American poet, author, editor, and educator
• April 12 – Alexander Ostrovsky, Russian dramatist
• April 19 – Anna Laetitia Waring, Welsh poet and hymnist
• August 2 – Edward Augustus Freeman, English historian and politician
• August 13 – Goldwin Smith, English historian and journalist
• September 23 – Sara Jane Lippincott, American author, poet, correspondent, lecturer, and newspaper founder
• September 27 – Augusta Harvey Worthen, American author and educator
• October 6 – George Henry Boker, American poet, playwright and diplomat
• December 28 – Augusta Theodosia Drane, English religious writer and biographer

  Deaths

• February 7 – Ann Radcliffe, English novelist
• February 21 – Charles Wolfe, Irish poet
• April 10 – Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Austrian philosopher
• April 21 – Peter Collett, Danish judge and writer
• May 16 – Ōta Nanpo, Japanese comic poet and painter
• June 19 – William Combe, English writer, poet and adventurer
• August 19 – Robert Bloomfield, English "ploughboy poet"
• August 20 – Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, German encyclopedia publisher and editor
• September 11 – David Ricardo, English political economist
• November 9 – Vasily Kapnist, Russian poet and dramatist

  Awards

• Chancellor's Gold Medal – Winthrop Mackworth Praed
• Newdigate Prize – T. S. Salmon