1859 in literature

Events

• c. January – Tidskrift för hemmet, the first women's magazine in the Nordic countries, is founded by Sophie Leijonhufvud and Rosalie Olivecrona in Stockholm.
• February 1 – George Eliot's Adam Bede, her first full-length novel, is published by John Blackwood in the United Kingdom. Contemporary reviews are largely positive, describing it as "of the highest class". and "first-rate"; However, it is also accused of being "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" and circulating libraries refuse to stock it or will supply it only under the counter.
• February 4 – German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf identifies portions of the mid-4th century Codex Sinaiticus at Saint Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in the Khedivate of Egypt and arranges for its presentation to his patron, Tsar Alexander II of Russia at Saint Petersburg.
• April 30 – Charles Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round is published for the first time in London, succeeding Household Words and containing the first serial installment of his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities.
• June–July – Frances Harper's "The Two Offers", the first English-language short story by an African American author, is published in the first volume of The Anglo-African Magazine.
• September – Twenty three-year-old Isabella Beeton's Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management begins publication as a partwork supplement to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, published by her husband Samuel Orchart Beeton in London.
• November 26 – Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, an early example of mystery fiction, begins serialization in All the Year Round.

• The first translation of Adam Mickiewicz's Polish epic poem Pan Tadeusz into another language, Belarusian, is made by the writer and dramatist Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich, in Vilnius, but pressure from the authorities of the ruling Russian Empire means he is able to publish only the first two chapters.

  New books

Fiction

• George Webbe Dasent – Popular Tales from the Norse
• Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Village of Stepanchikovo
• George Eliot
• *Adam Bede
• *The Lifted Veil
• Augusta Jane Evans – Beulah
• Ivan Goncharov – Oblomov
• Mary Jane Holmes – Dora Deane
• Charles Lever – Davenport Dunn: A Man of our Day
• Hector Malot – Les Amants
• George Meredith – The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
• Viktor Rydberg – Den siste Atenaren
• George Sand
• *Elle et lui
• *L'Homme de neige
• *Jean de la Roche
• *Narcisse
• Harriet Beecher Stowe – The Minister's Wooing
• Leo Tolstoy – Family Happiness
• Ivan Turgenev – Home of the Gentry
• Harriet E. Wilson – Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

Children and young people

• R. M. Ballantyne – The World of Ice

  Drama

• Dion Boucicault – The Octoroon
• Dinabandhu Mitra – Nil Darpan
• Alexander Ostrovsky – The Storm
• Watts Phillips – The Dead Heart
• Aleksey Pisemsky – A Bitter Fate

  Poetry

• Edward Fitzgerald – The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
• Alfred Tennyson – Idylls of the King
• Victor Hugo – La Légende des siècles, first series

  Non-fiction

• Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species
• William Henry Harvey – Phycologia Australica
• Washington Irving – The Life of George Washington, Volume 5
• Søren Kierkegaard – The Point of View of My Work as an Author
• Karl Marx – Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
• John Stuart Mill – On Liberty
• Samuel Smiles – Self-Help
• Robert Vaughan – Revolutions in English History

  Births

• March 8 – Kenneth Grahame, Scottish-born children's author
• March 26 – A. E. Housman, English poet
• May 1 – Alexandru Philippide, Romanian linguist and polemicist
• May 2 – Jerome K. Jerome, English humorous writer
• May 6 – Willem Kloos, Dutch poet and critic
• May 22
• * Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish-born physician and prolific writer
• * Tsubouchi Shōyō, Japanese writer
• June 8 — Mary Cholmondeley, English writer
• June 10 — Jacques Perk, Dutch poet
• July 8 — Annie S. Swan, Scottish novelist
• August 4 – Knut Hamsun, Norwegian Nobel Prize–winning author
• August 8 – Henry Gauthier-Villars, French writer
• September 24 – S. R. Crockett, Scottish novelist
• September 26 – Irving Bacheller, American journalist and writer
• October 18 – Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature
• November 2 – Augusta Peaux, Dutch poet
• December 5 – Sidney Lee, English biographer
• December 15 – L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto

  Deaths

• January 20 – Bettina von Arnim, German novelist
• January 21 – Henry Hallam, English historian
• January 28 – William H. Prescott, American historian
• February 13 – Eliza Acton, English cookery writer and poet
• February 27 – Thomas Kibble Hervey, Scottish-born poet and critic
• April 14 – Lady Morgan, Irish novelist
• April 16 – Alexis de Tocqueville, French historian and political author
• April 29 – Dionysius Lardner, Irish scientific writer
• July 23 – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, French poet
• September 2 – Delia Bacon, American playwright and Shakespeare scholar
• September 27 – Marițica Bibescu, Wallachian poet and literary patron
• October 4 – Karl Baedeker, German guidebook publisher
• November 7 – Auguste Hilarion, French politician and writer
• November 16 – William Spalding, Scottish writer and scholar
• November 20 – Mountstuart Elphinstone, Scottish historian
• November 28 – Washington Irving, American fiction writer, biographer and historian
• December 1 – John Austin, English legal philosopher
• December 8 – Thomas de Quincey, English essayist
• December 16 – Wilhelm Grimm, German collector of folk tales
• December 28 – Thomas Macaulay, English-born poet, historian and politician