1827 in literature

Events

• January – Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin begins his Irish-language diary, later published as Cín Lae Amhlaoibh.
• February – Thomas De Quincey's essay On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts is published in Blackwood's Magazine.
• February 23 – Sir Walter Scott's authorship of the Waverley Novels is first publicly acknowledged at an Edinburgh Theatrical Fund dinner.
• April 16 – Nathaniel Willis Senior begins publishing a new magazine for children, The Youth's Companion, in Boston, Massachusetts, weekly from June 6. One of the most enduring of its type, the magazine continues until 1929.
• September 4 – Great Fire of Turku concerns the largest city in Finland at that time. It destroyed Finnish archives, including practically all material from Finland's Middle Ages. The library of the Royal Academy of Turku was also destroyed.
• October 14 – Ludwig Tieck's Potsdam production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is the first to feature the incidental music composed by Felix Mendelssohn.

• Samuel Griswold Goodrich publishes the first of the "Peter Parley" juvenile books in the United States, which will continue until 1860.
• Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street officer, the earliest collection of detective stories, is published in London by Henry Colburn.
• The Swedish theatre director Johan Peter Strömberg opens what will become the Christiania Theatre in Norway.
• John James Audubon begins publication of a 10-volume The Birds of America in the United Kingdom.

  New books

Fiction

• James Fenimore Cooper
• *The Prairie
• *The Red Rover
• Benjamin Disraeli – Vivian Grey, vol. 2
• Thomas Gaspey – Richmond
• Émile de Girardin – Émile
• Catherine Gore
• *The Lettre de Cachet
• *The Reign of Terror
• Sarah Josepha Hale – Northwood: Life North and South
• Wilhelm Hauff
• *Jud Süß
• *Phantasien im Bremer Ratskeller
• Christian Isobel Johnstone – Elizabeth de Bruce
• Sir Thomas Dick Lauder – The Wolf of Badenoch
• Jane Webb –
• Alessandro Manzoni – I Promessi sposi
• Sydney, Lady Morgan – The O'Briens and The O'Flaherties
• Karoline Pichler – Die Schweden in Prag
• Sir Walter Scott – Chronicles of the Canongate
• Catharine Maria Sedgwick – Hope Leslie
• Horatio Smith – Reuben Aspley

  Children

Drama

• John Baldwin Buckstone – Luke the Labourer
• Christian Dietrich Grabbe – Herzog Theodor von Gotland
• Victor Hugo – Cromwell

  Poetry

• Fitz-Greene Halleck – Alnwick Castle, with Other Poems
• Heinrich Heine – Buch der Lieder
• John Keble – The Christian Year
• Giacomo Leopardi – Operette Morali
• Robert Pollok – The Course of Time
• Edgar Allan Poe – Tamerlane and Other Poems
• Alfred and Charles Tennyson – Poems by Two Brothers

  Non-fiction

• Elizabeth Beverley – Veluti in speculum
• Franz Bopp – Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der Sanskritsprache
• Encyclopædia Edinensis
• Henry Hallam – The Constitutional History of England
• William Macmichael – The Gold-Headed Cane
• John Ayrton Paris – Philosophy in Sport made Science in Earnest: Being an Attempt to Implant in the Young Mind the First Principles of Natural Philosophy by the Aid of the Popular Toys and Sports of Youth
• Lady Louisa Stuart – Memoir of Lady Mary Coke

  Births

• February 17 – Rose Terry Cooke, American author and poet
• February 22 – Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Bengali writer and philosopher
• March 4 – Henrietta Keddie, Scottish novelist and children's writer
• March 25 – Edward Bradley, English novelist and cleric
• April 10 – Mary Helen Peck Crane, American activist and writer
• April 10 – Lew Wallace, American soldier, politician and novelist
• April 16 – Octave Crémazie, pioneering French Canadian poet
• June 12 – Johanna Spyri, Swiss children's author
• September 13 – Catherine Winkworth, English translator and hymnist
• September 18 – John Townsend Trowbridge, American author

• Margaret Eleanor Parker, English-born Scottish travel writer, social activist and social reformer

  Deaths

• February 18 – Joseph Heinrich Aloysius Gügler, Swiss philosopher and theologian
• May 28 – William James, English naval historian
• July 3 – David Davis, Welsh minister and poet
• July 22 – Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob, German economist
• July 27 – Fredrique Eleonore Baptiste, Swedish-Finnish playwright
• August 12 – William Blake, English poet and artist
• September 15 – Robert Pollok, Scottish poet
• October 10 – Ugo Foscolo, Greek-born Italian dramatist and poet
• November – Alethea Lewis, English novelist
• November 18 – Wilhelm Hauff, German poet and novelist
• December 15 – Helen Maria Williams, English novelist, poet and translator from French
• December 26 – Feliks Jarońskij, Polish philosopher

  Awards

• Newdigate Prize – Robert Stephen Hawker

  In literature

• May 12 – Establishment of the Pickwick Club, according to Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers.