1859 in literature

Events

• The book, Adam Bede[?] by George Eliot, was accused of being the "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" in Britain and was consequently withdrawn from libraries.

New Books

• Adam Bede[?] - George Eliot
• Les Amants[?] - Hector Malot[?]
• Dora Deane[?] - Mary Jane Holmes[?]
• The Idylls of the King[?] - Alfred Lord Tennyson
• The Last Athenian[?] - Viktor Rydverg[?]
• Oblomov[?] - Ivan Goncharov[?]
• On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
• The Ordeal of Richard Feverel[?] - George Meredith
• Rocambole[?] - Pierre Ponson[?]
• The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám[?] (poetry) - Edward Fitzgerald
• A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
• The World of Ice[?] - RM Ballantyne

Births

• Mary Cholmondeley[?], British writer (+ 1925)
• March 8 - Kenneth Grahame (+ 1932)
• May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (+ 1930)
• October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature
• December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Ruso-Polish initiator of Esperanto

Deaths

• November 28 - Washington Irving, author
• December 28 - Thomas Macaulay, poet, historian and politician

Awards