1832 in literature

Events

• February 4 – Chambers's Edinburgh Journal is established by William Chambers.
• March 31 – Tait's Edinburgh Magazine is established by William Tait.
• May 21 – Washington Irving returns to the United States after living in Europe for seventeen years.
• September 21 – Scottish historical novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott dies aged 61 at his home, Abbotsford House, leaving his novel The Siege of Malta unfinished; he is buried in the grounds of Dryburgh Abbey with Presbyterian and Episcopalian ministers in attendance. His novels Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous are published this year. On the same day, English poet and novelist Anna Maria Porter dies of typhus in Bristol aged 53.
• December – Richard Bentley, having purchased the remaining copyrights to all of Jane Austen's novels from her sister Cassandra, begins to return them to print in five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series.

• William Ticknor co-founds the publishing house that will become Ticknor and Fields, a predecessor of Houghton Mifflin, in Boston, Massachusetts.
• James Atkinson makes the first translation from Persian into English of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, The Sha Nameh of the Persian Poet Firdausi, translated and abridged in prose and verse with notes and illustrations; printed for the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland; sold by John Murray.
• The first Baedeker guidebook, Voyage du Rhin de Mayence à Cologne, by Karl Baedeker in Koblenz is published without a date.
• Ramón de Mesonero Romanos begins writing his series of Escenas matritenses, originally in Cartas españolas.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's is published.
• Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques opened on the site of the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris under Frédérick Lemaître.
• The early 13th century Færeyinga saga, written in Iceland, is first published.
• Publishers begin the use of a paper jacket to wrap book covers.

  New books

Fiction

• Carl Jonas Love Almqvist – Jaktslottet
• Honoré de Balzac
• *La Bourse
• *Le Curé de Tours
• *Le Colonel Chabert
• *Louis Lambert
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton – Eugene Aram
• Selina Davenport – The Unchanged
• Alfred de Vigny – Stello
• Benjamin Disraeli – Contarini Fleming
• Catherine Gore
• *The Fair of Mayfair
• *The Opera
• Robert Huish – Fitzallan
• Washington Irving – Tales of the Alhambra
• Letitia Elizabeth Landon - Heath's Book of Beauty, 1833
• Frederick Marryat – Newton Forster
• Alexander Pushkin – Dubrovsky
• Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve – Volupte
• Rosalia St. Clair – The Doomed One
• George Sand
• *Indiana
• *Valentine
• Sir Walter Scott
• *Castle Dangerous
• *Count Robert of Paris
• Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna – Combination

  Children

• Frederick Marryat – Newton Forster
• Catherine Sinclair – Charlie Seymour, or, The Good Aunt and the Bad Aunt

  Drama

• Casimir Delavigne – Louis XI
• Alfred de Vigny – Stello
• Aleksander Fredro – Pan Jowialski
• Victor Hugo – Le Roi s'amuse
• Douglas William Jerrold
• *The Bride of Ludgate
• *The Factory Girl
• *The Rent Day
• James Sheridan Knowles – The Hunchback
• Li Qianfu, translated by Stanislas Julien – Le Cercle de craie

  Poetry

• Leigh Hunt – Poetical Works
• Adam Mickiewicz – Dziady
• Aleksandr Pushkin – Eugene Onegin

  Non-fiction

• John Austin -The Province of Jurisprudence Determined
• Carl von Clausewitz – Vom Krieg
• William Sawrey Gilpin – Practical Hints upon Landscape Gardening: with some remarks on Domestic Architecture, as connected with scenery
• Anna Brownell Jameson – Characteristics of Women
• Lord Mahon – History of the War of Succession in Spain
• Frances Trollope – Domestic Manners of the Americans

  Births

• January 13 – Horatio Alger, Jr., American writer
• January 27 – Lewis Carroll, English children's writer and scholar
• March 10 – Mary Bigelow Ingham, American author and educator
• May 17 – Grace Webster Haddock Hinsdale, American author
• June 10 – Edwin Arnold, English poet
• June 11 – Jules Vallès, French writer
• June 23 – Gustav Jaeger, German naturalist
• June 30 – Emily Lucas Blackall, American author and philanthropist
• July 27 – Hesba Stretton, English children's author
• August 3 – Edward Wilmot Blyden, Liberian pan-Africanist
• September 30 – Charlotte Riddell, née Cowan, Anglo-Irish novelist and editor
• October 9 – Elizabeth Akers Allen, American poet and journalist
• October 12 – Theodore Watts-Dunton, English critic and poet
• November 28 – Leslie Stephen, English writer
• November 29 – Louisa May Alcott, American novelist
• December 8 – Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Norwegian novelist and Nobel laureate

  Deaths

• February 3 – George Crabbe, English poet
• March 22 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German novelist, dramatist and poet
• June 6 – Jeremy Bentham, English philosopher and social reformer
• July 17 – John Carr, English travel writer and lawyer
• September 12 – Priscilla Wakefield, English Quaker writer and philanthropist
• September 21
• *Anna Maria Porter, English poet and novelist
• *Sir Walter Scott, Scottish historical novelist and poet
• November 14 – Rasmus Christian Rask, Danish philologist
• December 18 – Philip Freneau, American poet and polemicist

• Maria Elizabeth Budden, English novelist and writer of didactic children's books

  In literature

• George Eliot's novels Felix Holt, the Radical and Middlemarch are set around the time of the British Reform Act 1832.
• Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables climaxes with this year's June Rebellion in Paris.