1863 in literature

Events

• January 1 – The essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorates today's Emancipation Proclamation in the United States by composing "Boston Hymn" and surprising a crowd of 3,000 with a debut reading of it at Boston Music Hall.
• January 31 – Jules Verne's novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen is published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel in Paris. It will be the first of Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires.
• February 3 – Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in signing a humorous letter to the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada, first uses the pen name Mark Twain.
• February 28 – Flaubert and Turgenev meet for the first time, in Paris.
• June 12 – The Arts Club is founded by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Frederic Leighton and others in London's Mayfair, as a social meeting place for those involved or interested in the creative arts.
• June 13 – Samuel Butler's dystopian article "Darwin among the Machines" is published in The Press newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand; it will be incorporated into his novel Erewhon.
• November – Mendele Mocher Sforim's his first Yiddish language story, "Dos Kleine Menshele", is published in the Odessa weekly Kol Mevasser.
• December 29 – An estimated 7000 people attend the funeral of William Makepeace Thackeray at Kensington Gardens and nearly 2000 his burial in London's Kensal Green Cemetery.

• *The Romanian Junimea literary society is established in Iași. It will exercise a major influence on Romanian culture until the 1910s.
• *Elvira, or the Love of a Tyrant, a novel by the Neapolitan author Giuseppe Folliero de Luna, becomes the first published in the Maltese language, as Elvira Jew Imħabba ta’ Tirann.
• *Publication begins in the U.K. of a seminal edition of The Works of William Shakespeare, edited by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright, published by Macmillan and printed by Cambridge University Press.

  New books

Fiction

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• *Aurora Floyd
• *Eleanor's Victory
• Nikolai Chernyshevsky – What Is to Be Done?
• George Eliot – Romola
• "Charles Felix" – The Notting Hill Mystery
• Elizabeth Gaskell – Sylvia's Lovers
• Théophile Gautier – Captain Fracasse
• Edward Everett Hale – The Man Without a Country
• Mary Jane Holmes – Marian Grey
• Jean Ingelow – "The Prince's Dream"
• Julia Kavanagh – Queen Mab
• Sheridan Le Fanu – The House by the Churchyard
• Mrs Oliphant – Salem Chapel, first of The Chronicles of Carlingford
• Ouida – Held in Bondage
• Charles Reade – Very Hard Cash
• Miguel Riofrío – La Emancipada
• Anne Thackeray Ritchie – The Story of Elizabeth
• Leo Tolstoy – The Cossacks
• John Townsend Trowbridge – Cudjo's Cave
• Giovanni Verga – Sulle Lagune

  Children and young people

• Charles Kingsley – The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby
• Jules Verne – Five Weeks in a Balloon

  Drama

• W. S. Gilbert – Uncle Baby
• Tom Taylor – The Ticket-of-Leave Man

  Poetry

• Rosalía de Castro – Cantares gallegos
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Tales of a Wayside Inn, including "Paul Revere's Ride"

  Non-fiction

• John Austin – Lectures on Jurisprudence
• Samuel Bache – Miracles the Credentials of the Christ
• William Barnes – Glossary of Dorset Dialect
• Henry Walter Bates – The Naturalist on the River Amazons.
• William Wells Brown –
• Francis James Child – Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
• Gustav Freytag – Die Technik des Dramas
• Alexander Gilchrist – Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus"; with selections from his poems and other writings
• William Howitt – History of the Supernatural
• Fanny Kemble – Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839
• Charles Lyell – Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man
• Ernest Renan – The Life of Jesus

  Births

• February 9 – Anthony Hope, English novelist and playwright
• March 3 – Arthur Machen, Welsh novelist and short story writer
• March 12 – Gabriele D'Annunzio, Italian poet
• March 17 – Olivia Shakespear, British novelist, playwright and patron of the arts
• April 9 – Henry De Vere Stacpoole, Irish novelist
• April 26 – Arno Holz, German Naturalist poet and dramatist
• April 29 – Constantine Cavafy, Greek Alexandrine poet
• June 10 – Louis Couperus, Dutch fiction writer
• June 20 – Florence White, English food writer
• July 13 – Margaret Murray, Indian-born English archeologist and historian
• August 7 – Gene Stratton Porter, American novelist and naturalist
• September 1 – Violet Jacob, Scottish historical novelist and poet
• September 8 – W. W. Jacobs, English short story writer
• September 22 – Ferenc Herczeg, Hungarian dramatist
• November 1
• *Charlotte O'Conor Eccles, Irish-born London writer, translator and journalist
• *Arthur Morrison, English writer
• November 18 – Richard Dehmel, German poet
• November 21 – Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, English novelist and anthologist
• December 16 – George Santayana, American novelist and poet

  Deaths

• May 13 – August Hahn, German Protestant theologian
• July 3 – William Barksdale, American journalist and Confederate general
• September 17 – Alfred de Vigny, French poet, dramatist and novelist
• September 20 – Jacob Grimm, German philologist and fairy-tale author
• October 6 – Frances Trollope, English novelist and writer
• October 8 – Richard Whately, English theologian and archbishop
• December 13 – Christian Friedrich Hebbel, German poet and dramatist
• December 17 – Émile Saisset, French philosopher
• December 24 – William Makepeace Thackeray, Indian-born English novelist and travel writer

  Awards

• Newdigate Prize – Thomas Llewellyn Thomas