1829 in literature

Events

• January 26 – The first performance of Douglas Jerrold's comic nautical melodrama Black-Eyed Susan; or, All in the Downs is held at the Surrey Theatre in Lambeth, London. It will run for a new record of well over 150 performances.
• January 29 – The first complete performance of Goethe's , adapted by August Klingemann, in Braunschweig.
• September – George Eliot's novel Middlemarch opens.
• October 29 – The English actress Fanny Kemble makes her stage debut as Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, at her father's Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in London.

• Louis Braille invents a new alphabet and embossed printing that allows the blind to read.
• The Raczyński Library in Poznań is opened to the public.

  New books

Fiction

• Edward Bulwer-Lytton – Devereux
• Honoré de Balzac – Les Chouans
• Steen Steensen Blicher – The Rector of Veilbye
• William Nugent Glascock – Sailors and Saints, or Matrimonial Manœuvres
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants
• Catherine Gore – Romances of Real Life
• Gerald Griffin – The Collegians
• Victor Hugo – The Last Day of a Condemned Man
• Washington Irving – Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada
• George Payne Rainsford James – Richelieu
• Julia Pardoe – Lord Morcar of Hereward
• Thomas Love Peacock – The Misfortunes of Elphin
• Walter Scott – Anne of Geierstein

  Children

• Frederick Marryat – The Naval Officer, or Scenes in the Life and Adventures of Frank Mildmay

  Drama

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust
• Victor Hugo – Marion Delorme
• Douglas William Jerrold – Black-Eyed Susan
• John Augustus Stone – Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags

  Poetry

• Edgar Allan Poe – Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Other Poems
• Alfred Tennyson – Timbuctoo
• Henrik Wergeland
• *Digte, første Ring
• *Skabelsen, Mennesket og Messias

  Non-fiction

• Hans Christian Andersen – A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager
• Thomas Carlyle – Signs of the Times
• William Cobbett
• *The English Gardener
• *Advice to Young Men
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – On the Constitution of Church and State
• Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 1
• Washington Irving – Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada
• Cornelio Saavedra – Memoria autógrafa
• Philip Stanhope, Viscount Mahon – Life of Belisarius
• David Walker – Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America

  Births

• January 1 – Tommaso Salvini, Italian memoirist and actor
• January 12 – Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon, née Mullins, Canadian novelist and poet
• February 24 – Friedrich Spielhagen, German novelist
• April 26 – Eva Brag, Swedish poet, novelist and journalist
• March 4 – Samuel Rawson Gardiner, English historian
• May 1 – José de Alencar, Brazilian novelist
• June 4 – Jane Lippitt Patterson, American writer and editor
• June 19 – Helen Vickroy Austin, American essayist, journalist, and horticulturist
• October 31 – Emma Tatham, English poet
• September 12 – Charles Dudley Warner, American essayist and novelist
• September 25 – William Michael Rossetti, English critic
• November 21 – Martha Perry Lowe, American writer and activist
• December 8 – Henry Timrod, American poet

  Deaths

• January 6 – Josef Dobrovský, Czech historian
• January 11 – Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, German poet and critic
• January 15 – John Mastin, English memoirist, local historian and cleric
• January 29 – István Pauli Hungarian Slovene priest and writer
• February 11 – Aleksander Griboyedov, Russian dramatist
• July 7 – Jacob Friedrich von Abel, German philosopher
• July 23 – Wojciech Bogusławski, Polish playwright and director
• September 29 – Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont, political writer
• October 10 – Maria Elizabetha Jacson, English writer on botany and gardening

  Awards

• Newdigate prize – Robert Stephen Hawker