1841 in literature

Events

• January – The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning is given a golden cocker spaniel, "Flush", by the writer Mary Russell Mitford.
• March 4 – Dion Boucicault's first London première, the comedy London Assurance, opens at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. It is presented by the husband-and-wife team Charles Matthews and Elizabeth Vestris.
• April 10 – Horace Greeley begins publication of the New-York Tribune.
• April 20 – Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" appears in Graham's Magazine, where he has become editor in February. It will be recognized as the first significant work of detective fiction.
• July 17 – Punch magazine, founded in London by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells, is edited by Mayhew and Mark Lemon.
• July 20 – The English "peasant poet" John Clare absconds from an asylum for the insane at High Beach in Essex and walks 90 miles to his home at Northborough in the East Midlands. In late December he is admitted to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum where he will spend the remaining 23 years of his life.
• July 28 – Mary Rogers, the "Beautiful Cigar Girl", is found murdered in New York City. This will inspire Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" of the following year, as a sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".

• The London publisher Edward Moxon is convicted of blasphemous libel for an edition of Shelley's poem Queen Mab with its atheistic passages restored.
• Anthony Panizzi and his staff at the British Museum Library in London devise "Ninety-One Cataloguing Rules".
• The London Library is founded in Pall Mall, London on the initiative of Thomas Carlyle.
• Tauchnitz publishers of Leipzig begin their Collection of British and American Authors with Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham. This authorized series of cheap reprints will become popular with Anglophone travelers in continental Europe.

  New books

Fiction

• Khachatur Abovian – Wounds of Armenia
• W. Harrison Ainsworth – Old St. Paul's
• Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe – Norwegian Folktales
• Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda – Sab
• Honoré de Balzac – Le Curé de village
• Edward Bulwer – Night and Morning
• James Fenimore Cooper – The Deerslayer
• Catherine Crowe – The Adventures of Susan Hopley
• Charles Dickens
• *Master Humphrey's Clock
• *The Old Curiosity Shop
• *
• Catherine Gore
• *Greville, or a Season in Paris
• *Cecil, or Adventures of a Coxcomb
• *Cecil, A Peer
• Jeremias Gotthelf – Uli der Knecht
• Theodor Mundt – Thomas Münzer
• Edgar Allan Poe – short stories
• *"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
• *"A Descent into the Maelström"
• *"Eleonora"
• *"Never Bet the Devil Your Head"
• *"Three Sundays in a Week"
• Eugène Sue – Mathilde
• A. K. Tolstoy – The Vampire
• Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
• *Conformity
• *Falsehood and Truth
• *Helen Fleetwood: Tales of the Factories
• Samuel Warren – Ten Thousand a Year

  Children

• Frederick Marryat
• *Joseph Rushbrook, or The Poacher
• *Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific
• Agnes Strickland – Alda, the British Captive

  Drama

• Dion Boucicault – London Assurance
• Robert Browning – Pippa Passes
• Mary Russell Mitford – Inez de Castro
• George Dibdin Pitt – Susan Hopley; or, The Vicissitudes of a Servant Girl
• Jules-Édouard Alboize de Pujol – Le Tribut des cent vierges
• Juliusz Słowacki – Fantazy
• John Watkins – John Frost: a Chartist play

  Poetry

• Mikhail Lermontov – The Demon: An Eastern Tale
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Excelsior
• James Russell Lowell – A Year's Life
• Alexander Pushkin – The Bronze Horseman

  Non-fiction

• George Borrow – The Zincali; or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain
• Thomas Carlyle – On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History
• Ralph Waldo Emerson – Essays
• Ludwig Feuerbach – Das Wesen des Christentums
• Washington Irving – Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson
• Søren Kierkegaard – On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates
• Edgar Allan Poe – "A Few Words on Secret Writing"
• Augustus Pugin – The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture

  Births

• January 15 – Sarah Doudney, English novelist, hymnist and children's writer
• February 28 – Jean Mounet-Sully, French actor
• March 21 – Mathilde Blind, German-born English poet
• March 31 – Iosif Vulcan, Romanian poet, playwright and novelist
• April 6 – Ivan Surikov, Russian poet
• April 18 – Georges de Peyrebrune, French novelist
• April 30 – Laura Jacinta Rittenhouse, American author and poet
• May 20 – Sara Louisa Oberholtzer, American poet and economist
• May 22 – Catulle Mendès, French poet
• June 19 – Hermann Eduard von Holst, German historian
• June 21 – Charitie Lees Smith, American hymnwriter
• July 4 – Susan Marr Spalding, American poet
• August 3 – Juliana Horatia Ewing, English children's writer
• August 4 – William Henry Hudson, Argentinian-born English writer and naturalist
• August 18 – Robert Williams Buchanan, Scottish author
• September 20 – Walter Bradford Woodgate, English boating writer and oarsman
• September 24 – Kate Brownlee Sherwood, American poet, journalist, and translator
• September 27 – Aubertine Woodward Moore, American musician and writer
• October 6 – Clement Scott, English critic and travel writer
• November 3 – Isabella Macdonald Alden, American author
• November 8 – John Charles Dent, English-born Canadian journalist and historian
• November 13 – William Black, Scottish novelist
• December 29 – Henrietta A. Bingham, American writer and editor

• *Emily Pitts Stevens, American editor, publisher, educator, and activist
• *Emily Elizabeth Veeder, American novelist and poet

• Liu Qingyun, Chinese playwright and poet

  Deaths

• January 12 – Märta Helena Reenstierna, Swedish diarist
• February 21 – Dorothea Tieck, German translator
• April 8 – James Browne, Scottish man of letters
• May 7 – Thomas Barnes, English editor of The Times
• May 20 – Joseph Blanco White, Spanish-born English poet and theologian
• July 27 – Mikhail Lermontov, Russian poet
• August 11 – Johann Friedrich Herbart, German philosopher
• September 16 – Thomas John Dibdin, English playwright
• October 31 – Georg Anton Friedrich Ast, German philologist and philosopher
• December 12 – Denis-Luc Frayssinous, French theologian and bishop