1833 in literature

Events

• January – The Knickerbocker is established by Charles Fenno Hoffman as The Knickerbacker: or, New-York monthly magazine.
• c. January – Richard Bentley issues the first collected edition of Jane Austen's novels.
• February 16 – Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet begin a fifty-year affair. This is recorded in his novel Les Misérables as the date of Marius and Cosette's wedding night.
• March 16 – Parley's Magazine, an American periodical for young readers, publishes its first issue in Boston.
• March 25 – Edmund Kean, playing Othello to the Iago of his son, Charles Kean, collapses on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, and dies two months later.
• June 10 – The Dramatic Authors Act passed in the United Kingdom grants playwrights copyright in their work.
• Summer – George Sand and Alfred de Musset begin a two-year affair, recorded in their respective novels Elle et lui and La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle.
• September 15 – The English poet Arthur Henry Hallam, a close friend of Tennyson and engaged to be married to his sister Emily), dies suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in Vienna aged 22. This year Tennyson writes "Ulysses" in his memory, "Tithon" and "The Two Voices". He begins "Morte d'Arthur" and "Tiresias". In 1850 he will publish In Memoriam A.H.H.
• October 3 – The Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson marries the French composer Hector Berlioz in a civil ceremony at the British Embassy in Paris.
• December 1 – Charles Dickens' first published work of fiction, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", is the first item in what will become Sketches by Boz. It appears unsigned in the Monthly Magazine.

• Alphonse de Lamartine is elected a député of France.
• Publication begins in England of The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, edited by George Long.
• The first of the Bridgewater Treatises, examining science in relation to God, is published in England.
• The first complete German translation of Shakespeare's plays appears: Shakespeares Dramatische Werke, by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck and his daughter Dorothea, and Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin.
• Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer's instructional text The Peep of Day, or, A series of the earliest religious instruction the infant mind is capable of receiving appears in England. It will sell a million copies in 38 languages.
• The first printing press in Jerusalem is set up in the Armenian Quarter.

  New books

Fiction

• Honoré de Balzac
• *Eugenie Grandet
• *Ferragus
• *:fr:Le Médecin de campagne|Le Médecin de campagne
• Edward Bulwer – Godolphin
• Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus
• Massimo D'Azeglio – Ettore Fieramosca
• Benjamin Disraeli – Alroy
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Outre-Mer
• Alfred de Musset – Gamiani, ou deux nuits d'excès
• Aleksandr Pushkin – Eugene Onegin
• George Sand
• *Andréa
• *Jacques
• *Kouroglou / Épopée Persane
• *Lelia
• *Leone Leoni
• *Mattéa
• Michael Scott – Tom Cringle's Log

  Children and young people

• Agnes Strickland – Historical Tales of Illustrious British Children

  Drama

• Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff – The Wooers
• Aleksander Fredro – Maidens' Vows, or the Magnetism of the Heart
• Aleksander Griboyedov – Woe from Wit
• Victor Hugo
• *Lucrezia Borgia
• *Marie Tudor
• Johann Nestroy – Lumpaziva gabundus
• Eugène Scribe – Bertrand et Raton, ou l'art de conspirer

  Poetry

• Robert Browning – Pauline
• Hartley Coleridge – Poems, songs and sonnets
• :de:Wilhelm Hey |Wilhelm Hey – Fünfzig Fabeln für Kinder
• Alfred Tennyson – Poems
• See also 1833 in poetry

  Non-fiction

• Franz Bopp – Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litthauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen
• Godfrey Higgins – Anacalypsis
• Charles Lamb – Last Essays of Elia
• Webster's Revision of the Bible

  Births

• January 23 – Lewis Morris, Anglo-Welsh poet
• May 27 – Hester Martha Poole, American writer, poet, and art critic
• June 19 – Mary Tenney Gray, American editorial writer, club-woman, philanthropist, and suffragette
• July 9 – Florence Marryat, English novelist and entertainer
• August 9 – Emily Pepys, English child diarist
• August 12 – Lillie Devereux Blake, American writer and reformer
• August 20 – Vasile Pogor, Romanian poet, scholar and politician
• October 19 – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Australian poet, jockey and politician
• October 8 – Edmund Clarence Stedman, American poet and critic
• October 21 – Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor and entrepreneur, creator of the Nobel Prize
• November 2 – Horace Howard Furness, American Shakespearean scholar
• November 6 – Jonas Lie, Norwegian writer
• November 9 – Émile Gaboriau, French writer
• December 27 – Larin Paraske, Izhorian oral poet

  Deaths

• January 14 – Gottlob Ernst Schulze, German philosopher
• February 3 – Nikolay Gnedich, Russian poet and translator
• February 4 – John O'Keeffe, Irish dramatist
• March 7 – Rahel Varnhagen, German literary hostess
• March 11 – Franz Passow, German classicist and lexicographer
• April 13 – Elisa von der Recke, German poet
• May 10 – François Andrieux, French man of letters and dramatist
• May 15 – Edmund Kean, English Shakespearean actor
• August 25 – Jean-Louis Laya, French dramatist
• September 7 – Hannah More, English religious writer and philanthropist
• September 15 – Arthur Hallam, English poet
• October 4 – Maria Jane Jewsbury, English writer, poet and reviewer, dies in India