1852 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1852.

Events

• February 2 – Alexandre Dumas, fils's stage adaptation of his 1848 novel La Dame aux caméllias is premièred at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris.
• February 24 – Nikolai Gogol burns some of his manuscripts, including most of the second part of Dead Souls, telling acquaintances the action is a practical joke played on him by the Devil. He takes to his bed and dies a few days later.
• March – Serialization of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House begins; the September installment introduces the first detective in an English novel.^[1]
• March 20 – Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is first published in book form, by John P. Jewett of Boston with illustrations by Hammatt Billings, rapidly establishing its position as the best-selling novel of the 19th century.^[2] The first British publication (by Samuel Orchart Beeton) is in April^[3] followed by C. H. Clarke and Co.'s in May and John Cassell's serial issue with illustrations by George Cruikshank, together with pirated reprints from Routledge. The first dramatic adaptations appear on the New York stage from Autumn. This year also, Jewett publishes the first work of fiction in English by an African American, the escaped slave Frederick Douglass's novella The Heroic Slave, a heartwarming Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty.
• April – Samuel Orchart Beeton launches The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, the first British magazine aimed at a middle-class female readership.^[3]
• April 16 – Ivan Turgenev is imprisoned and exiled to his country estate over an obituary praising Gogol.^[4]
• April 24 – Wilkie Collins' first contribution to Household Words, "The traveller's story of a terribly strange bed", is an early example of crime fiction involving the (Paris) police.^[5]
• August 5 – Exiled French novelist Victor Hugo moves to Jersey in the Channel Islands.
• September 2 – The public library in Campfield, Manchester, England, is the first to offer free lending^[6] under the U.K. Public Libraries Act 1850; Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens are present at the opening ceremony.
• November 23 – At the suggestion of English novelist Anthony Trollope, at this time an official of the British General Post Office, the first roadside pillar boxes in the British Isles are brought into public use in Saint Helier on Jersey in the Channel Islands.^[7]
• Pierre Larousse founds his publishing house in Paris.
• Hanah Mullens' Karuna O Phulmonir Bibaran is the first Bengali novel.^[8]

New books

Fiction

• Manuel Antônio de Almeida – Memoirs of a Police Sergeant
• Wilkie Collins – Basil: A Story of Modern Life
• Robert Criswell – "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Contrasted with Buckingham Hall, the Planter's Home
• Alphonse de Lamartine – Graziella
• Mary H. Eastman – Aunt Phillis's Cabin
• Baynard Rush Hall – Frank Freeman's Barber Shop
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • The Blithedale Romance
  • The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales
• Caroline Lee Hentz
  • Eoline
  • Marcus Warland
• Herman Melville – Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
• Susanna Moodie – Roughing It in the Bush
• Charles Jacobs Peterson (as J. Thornton Randolph) – The Cabin and Parlor; or, Slaves and Masters
• George W. M. Reynolds – Mary Price
• Caroline Rush – The North and the South; or, Slavery and Its Contrasts
• William L. G. Smith – Life at the South; or, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" As It Is
• Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom's Cabin
• William Makepeace Thackeray
  • The History of Henry Esmond
  • Men's Wives
• Leo Tolstoy – Childhood
• Catharine Parr Traill – Canadian Crusoes
• Ivan Turgenev – A Sportsman's Sketches
• Susan Bogert Warner – Queechy

Drama

• Manuel Bretón de los Herreros – La escuela del matrimonio
• Alexandre Dumas, fils – La Dame aux Caméllias
• Gustav Freytag – Die Journalisten
• Christian Friedrich Hebbel – Agnes Bernauer
• Tom Taylor and Charles Reade – Masks and Faces

Poetry

• Théophile Gautier – Emaux et camées

Non-fiction

• Juan Bautista Alberdi – Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina (Bases and points of departure for Argentine political organization)
• William Wells Brown – Three Years in Europe
• Kuno Fischer – System der Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre (System of logic and metaphysics, or doctrine of knowledge)
• Edward A. Freeman – The Preservation and Restoration of Ancient Monuments
• Victor Hugo – Napoléon le Petit
• Karl Marx – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon)
• Susanna Moodie – Roughing It in The Bush: or, Forest Life in Canada
• Dr. Peter Mark Roget – Roget's Thesaurus (1st edition)
• Leopold von Ranke – Französische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert (History of France, Principally in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; publication begins)

Births

• February 24 – George Moore, Irish novelist, memoirist and dramatist (died 1933)
• March 15 – Augusta, Lady Gregory, Irish dramatist and folklorist (died 1932)
• April 23 – Edwin Markham, American poet (died 1940)
• September 2 – Paul Bourget, French novelist, poet and critic (died 1935)
• October 31 – Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, American short-story and children's writer (died 1930)
• November 8 – Lin Shu (林紓), Chinese translator (died 1924)

Deaths

• February 17 – Micah Joseph Lebensohn, Lithuanian poet writing in Hebrew (born 1828)
• February 25 – Thomas Moore, Irish poet (born 1779)
• March 4 – Nikolai Gogol, Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer (born 1809)
• March 25 – Jane West (Prudentia Homespun), English novelist and writer of conduct books (born 1758)
• April 25 – Álvares de Azevedo, Brazilian Ultra-Romantic writer (born 1831) (tuberculosis)
• May 3 – Sara Coleridge, English author and translator (born 1802)
• May 12 – John Richardson, Canadian novelist (starvation, born 1796)
• May 25 – Charlotta Berger, Swedish poet and novelist (born 1784)
• September 11 – Margaret Holford the Younger, English poet and novelist (born 1778)
• September 30 – Mary Matilda Betham, English diarist, scholar and poet (born 1776)
• October 26 – Vincenzo Gioberti, Italian philosopher (apoplexy, born 1801)
• November 28 – Ludger Duvernay, French Canadian journalist and publisher (born 1799)
• December 16 – Samuel Lee, English orientalist and linguist (born 1783)

References