1857 in literature

Events

• January 5 – Wilkie Collins' drama The Frozen Deep is first performed in a private amateur performance featuring Charles Dickens, staged by him at his London home, Tavistock House.
• January 10 – Jules Verne marries Honorine de Viane Morel.
• February 7 – Gustave Flaubert's pioneering realist novel Madame Bovary is acquitted on charges of offending morals and religion from its 1856 expurgated serialization. It is published complete in book form in April by Michel Lévy Frères in Paris.
• May 5 – American publisher Moses Phillips hosts a dinner for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., James Russell Lowell and other literary notables at the Parker House Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts, to agree on launching The Atlantic Monthly, "a magazine of literature, art, and politics", on November 1 with Lowell as first editor.
• May 10 – Indian Rebellion of 1857 breaks out; it will feature extensively in subsequent fiction.
• June 25 – Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal is published in Paris. He will be convicted and some of the most decadent poems suppressed on charges of offending morals and religion.
• August 21 – 24 – Performances of Wilkie Collins' drama The Frozen Deep at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, for the benefit of the widow of writer Douglas William Jerrold, during which Charles Dickens, who is directing and performing, becomes infatuated with the professional actress Ellen Ternan.
• September – Obscene Publications Act 1857 is passed in the United Kingdom, making the sale of obscene material a statutory offence. William Dugdale, a prime target of the act, is one of the first to be charged under it. The Act is replaced with a less stringent one in 1959.
• September 25 – Eugène Sue's extended fiction Les Mystères du peuple is condemned on charges of offending morals and religion, the author having died on August 3.
• October – The Sacramento Library Association, predecessor of Sacramento Public Library, is established as a public subscription library in Sacramento, California, by members of the "Big Four" and other prominent citizens.
• November 1 – The Atlantic Monthly is first published, in Boston, Massachusetts, by Phillips, Sampson and Company.

• George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life are serialized in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine through the year, as her first work of fiction and the first use of her pseudonym.
• The British Museum Reading Room opens in London.

  New books

Fiction

• Hans Christian Andersen – To Be or Not to Be
• Matilda Betham-Edwards – The White House by the Sea
• George Borrow – The Romany Rye
• Charlotte Brontë – The Professor
• Juliet H. Lewis Campbell – Eros and Antieros; or, The Bachelor's Ward
• Wilkie Collins – The Dead Secret
• Charles De Coster – Légendes flamandes
• Charles Dickens – Little Dorrit
• Alexandre Dumas, père – The Wolf Leader
• Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich – Ciekawyś? Przeczytaj! Trzy powiastki i wierszyk ulotny
• Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary
• Théophile Gautier – Jettatura
• Catherine Gore – The Two Aristocracies
• George A. Lawrence – Guy Livingstone, or Thorough
• Fitz Hugh Ludlow – The Hasheesh Eater
• Herman Melville – The Confidence-Man
• G. W. M. Reynolds – The Necromancer
• X. B. Saintine – Seul
• Catharine Maria Sedgwick – Married or Single?
• Adalbert Stifter – Der Nachsommer
• William Makepeace Thackeray – The Virginians
• Anthony Trollope – Barchester Towers

  Children and young people

• R. M. Ballantyne
• *The Coral Island
• *Ungava: a Tale of Eskimo Land
• Clara de Chatelain – Little Folk's Books
• Thomas Hughes – Tom Brown's Schooldays
• Annie Keary – The Heroes of Asgard

  Drama

• Wilkie Collins – The Frozen Deep
• Ferdinand Dugué – William Shakespeare: drame en six actes
• Liautaud Ethéart – Le Monde de Chez Nous
• Charles Heavysege – Saul: a drama in three parts
• Henrik Ibsen – The Vikings at Helgeland
• Andreas Munch – Lord William Russell
• Ramnarayan Tarkaratna – Kulīn-Kul-Sarbasva

  Poetry

• Charles Baudelaire – Les Fleurs du mal

  Non-fiction

• Louis Agassiz – Essay on Classification
• Delia Bacon – The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays Unfolded
• Elizabeth Gaskell – The Life of Charlotte Brontë
• Philip Gosse – Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot
• Hinton Rowan Helper – The Impending Crisis of the South
• Chandos Wren-Hoskyns – Agricultural Statistics
• Washington Irving – The Life of George Washington, Volume 4
• Allan Kardec – The Spirits' Book
• David Livingstone – Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
• John David Macbride – The Mohammedan Religion Explained. With an Introductory Sketch of its Progress, and Suggestions for its Confutation
• Désiré van Monckhoven – Méthodes simplifiées de photographie sur papier
• William Smith – Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography

  Births

• February 7 – Benjamin Eli Smith, American editor of reference books
• February 9 – A. H. Bullen, English editor and publisher
• February 23 – Margaret Deland, American novelist
• March 27 – Ella Hepworth Dixon, English writer, novelist and editor
• July – Adriana Porter, American Wiccan poet
• July 24 – Henrik Pontoppidan, Danish Nobel Prize-winning author
• September 30 – Hermann Sudermann, German dramatist and novelist
• October 5 – Peadar Toner Mac Fhionnlaoich, Irish Gaelic writer
• October 31 – Axel Munthe, Swedish physician and author
• November 22 – George Gissing, English novelist and critic
• November 26 – Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist
• December 3 – Joseph Conrad, Polish-born English novelist and story writer

  Deaths

• January 5 – Albert Schwegler, German philosopher and theologian
• February 3 – Robert Wilberforce, English historian and religious writer
• March 11 – Manuel José Quintana, Spanish poet
• March 26 – John Mitchell Kemble, English historian
• April 19 – Elizabeth Wynne Fremantle, English diarist
• May 2 – Alfred de Musset, French novelist and poet
• June 8 – Douglas William Jerrold, English dramatist
• June 25 – Isabella Kelly, Scottish novelist and poet
• July 29 – James Holman, English travel writer
• August 3 – Eugène Sue, French novelist
• August 10 – John Wilson Croker, Irish writer and statesman
• September 5 – Auguste Comte, French philosopher
• September 18 – Jean Baptiste Gustave Planche, French critic
• November 26 – Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, German poet and novelist
• December 13 – Richard Furness, English poet

  Awards

• Newdigate Prize – Philip Stanhope Worsley