1830 in literature

Events

• February – Barthold Georg Niebuhr's house burns down, but most of his books are saved.
• February 25 – The première of Victor Hugo's play Hernani in Paris elicits protests from an audience seeing it as an attack on Classicism.
• March 26 – The Book of Mormon is published by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York.
• May 22 – Amos Bronson Alcott marries Abby May at King's Chapel, Boston.
• May 24 – Sarah Josepha Hale's Poems for Our Children, including "Mary's Lamb", with the verse "Mary Had a Little Lamb", is published by Marsh, Capen & Lyon in Boston, Massachusetts.
• July or later – Victor Cousin is elected to the Académie française to replace Joseph Fourier.
• July 1 – Edgar Allan Poe matriculates as a cadet at the United States Military Academy, West Point.
• August – François-René de Chateaubriand sacrifices his political career by refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to Louis-Philippe, and retires to write his memoirs.
• August 25 – Belgian Revolution breaks out; Flemish novelist Hendrik Conscience takes the side of the revolutionaries.
• December – Elizabeth Vestris becomes the first female actor-manager in the history of London theatre by leasing the Olympic Theatre in Drury Lane where she presents extravaganzas and burlesques.

• James Mill becomes head of the London office of the British East India Company.
• The English publishers Bradbury and Evans are established as printers by William Bradbury and Frederick Mullet Evans.
• Edward Moxon begins his own publishing business in London.
• The famous opening line of Edward Bulwer's novel, Paul Clifford, published this year, begins: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets, rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

  New books

Fiction

• Honoré de Balzac
• *La Maison du chat-qui-pelote
• *La Vendetta
• *Le Bal de Sceaux
• *Gobseck
• Edward Bulwer – Paul Clifford
• James Fenimore Cooper – The Water-Witch
• Oliver Wendell Holmes – Old Ironsides
• Thomas Love Peacock – Crotchet Castle
• Anna Maria Porter – The Barony
• Catharine Maria Sedgwick – A Tale of Our Times
• Mary Shelley – The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
• Louisa Stanhope – The Corsair's Bride
• Stendhal – The Red and the Black
• Princess Victoria – The Adventures of Alice Laselles

  Children

• Frederick Marryat – The King's Own
• Anna Maria Hall – Chronicles of a School-Room

  Drama

• Henrik Hertz – Amor's Strokes of Genius
• Douglas William Jerrold – The Mutiny at the Nore
• Jovan Sterija Popović – Laža i Paralaža
• Aleksandr Pushkin – Little Tragedies
• *The Stone Guest
• *Mozart and Salieri
• *The Miserly Knight
• *A Feast in Time of Plague
• Sir Walter Scott
• *Auchindrane
• *The Doom of Devorgoil

  Poetry

• Alphonse de Lamartine – Harmonies poétiques et religieuses
• Richard Lower – Tom Cladpole's Jurney to Lunnon, told by himself, and written in pure Sussex doggerel by his Uncle Tim
• Alfred de Musset – Comtes d'Espagne et d'Italie
• Caroline Norton – The Undying One and Other Poems
• Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve – Les Consolations
• Alfred Tennyson – Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

  Non-fiction

• Jeremy Bentham – Constitutional Code for All Nations
• William Cobbett – Rural Rides
• Humphry Davy – Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher
• Denis Diderot – La Promenade du sceptique
• Jacob Grimm – Hymnorum veteris ecclesiae XXVI. inter pretatio theodisca
• John Hughes, editor – The Boscobel Tracts
• Samuel Lee – Six Sermons on the Study of the Holy Scriptures, to Which are Annexed Two Dissertations
• Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology, vol. 1
• Thomas Moore – Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life
• Hermann, Fürst von Pückler-Muskau – Briefe eines Verstorbenen
• Joseph Smith – The Book of Mormon

  Births

• January 2 – Henry Kingsley, English novelist
• January 28 – Martha Foster Crawford, American writer and missionary
• February 28 – James Payn, English novelist
• March 15 – Paul Heyse, German writer and Nobel laureate
• March 18 – Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, French historian
• March 25 – Frederick Greenwood, English novelist and man of letters
• April 6 – Eugène Rambert, Swiss poet and writer
• April 21 – Mary A. Brayton Woodbridge, American editor and reformer
• May 17 – Sarah Gibson Humphreys, American author and suffragist
• May 20 – Hector Malot, French writer
• July 22 – Richard Copley Christie, English scholar
• September 8 – Frédéric Mistral, French poet
• September 2 – Josefina Wettergrund, Swedish writer
• September 11 – Frances Freeling Broderip, English children's writer
• October 15 – Helen Hunt Jackson, American writer and activist
• October 30 – Eliza Brightwen, Scottish naturalist
• December 5 – Christina Rossetti, English poet
• December 10 – Emily Dickinson, American poet
• December 17 – Jules de Goncourt, French founder of Prix Goncourt

• Mary Anna Needell, English novelist

  Deaths

• January 17 or 30 – Wilhelm Waiblinger, German Romantic poet
• January 26 – Maria Petronella Woesthoven, Dutch poet
• February 15 – Prince Ioane of Georgia, Georgian encyclopedist
• February 20 – Robert Anderson, Scottish literary editor, biographer and critic
• February 25 – Henrietta Maria Bowdler, English author and expurgator
• March 29 – James Rennell, English historian and oceanographer
• April 16 – József Katona, Hungarian dramatist and poet
• August 6 – David Walker, African American abolitionist
• August 20 – Vasily Pushkin, Russian poet
• September 18 – William Hazlitt, English essayist
• October 8 – Johann Gottfried Ebel, Prussian-born Swiss travel writer
• By November – Mary Diana Dods, Scottish writer known as "David Lyndsay", later "Walter Sholto Douglas"
• November 20 – Gustav von Ewers, German legal historian
• December 8 – Benjamin Constant, Swiss-born French liberal author
• December 31 – Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis, French dramatist and writer on education

  Awards

• Newdigate Prize – George Kettilby Rickards