1840 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1840.

Events

June – An amnesty to celebrate the accession of King Frederick William IV of Prussia results in novelist Fritz Reuter being freed from the Dömitz Fortress after two years' imprisonment on a charge of high treason.^[1]
July 6 – Novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray independently attend the hanging outside Newgate Prison in London of the murderer François Benjamin Courvoisier, who blames the influence of W. Harrison Ainsworth's Newgate novel Jack Sheppard (which concluded serialization in Bentley's Miscellany in February) for his crime.^[2]
August 10 – Fortsas hoax: Bibliophiles gather in Binche, Belgium for the auction of 52 meticulously-catalogued unique books from the collection of the late Comte de Fortsas. The Count, the books and the auction prove to be entirely fictitious.^[3]
The Percy Society is established in Britain as a text publication society to produce scholarly editions of early works in English.
William Martin publishes the first edition of Peter Parley's Annual, a periodical for children in imitation of the earlier American works by Samuel Griswold Goodrich.^[4]

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. – Two Years Before the Mast
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – What is Property?
Agnes Strickland – Lives of the Queens of England (begins publication)
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America (vol. 2)
William Whewell – The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, founded upon their history

January 18 – Henry Austin Dobson, English poet and essayist (died 1921)
April 2 – Émile Zola, French novelist (died 1902)
May 13 – Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet (died 1928)
September 2 – Giovanni Verga, Sicilian author (died 1922)
September 27 – Rosa Nouchette Carey, English children's novelist (died 1909)
November 29 – Rhoda Broughton, Welsh novelist and short-story writer (died 1920)
December 28 – Ioan Kalinderu, Romanian classical scholar, jurist and agriculturalist (died 1913)

January 6 – Frances Burney (Fanny Burney, Mme d'Arblay), English novelist and diarist (born 1752)
February 4 – Angélique de Rouillé, Belgian letter-writer (born 1756)
July 7 – Nikolai Stankevich, Russian philosopher and poet (born 1813)
August 25 – Karl Leberecht Immermann, German novelist and dramatist (born 1796)
September – Emma Roberts, English travel writer and poet (born 1794)

↑ One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Reuter, Fritz". Encyclopedia Americana.
↑ Sutherland, John (2012). The Dickens Dictionary. London: Icon. pp. 67–71. ISBN 978-184831-391-0. Thackeray writes the experience up as "Going to See a Man Hanged" in this month's issue of Fraser's Magazine (22: 150-158; repr. in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (1869) (London: Smith, Elder & Co.) 15:386); Dickens in The Daily News in February 1846.
↑ Klinefelter, Walter (1942). The Fortsas Bibliohoax. New York: Press of the Woolly Whale.
↑ Smith, George Gregory (1893). "Martin, William (1801-1867)". In Lee, Sidney. Dictionary of National Biography. 36. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 302.
↑ Hauge, Ingard (1975). "Poetisk realisme og nasjonalromantikk". In Beyer, Edvard. Norges Litteraturhistorie (in Norwegian). 2. Oslo: Cappelen. pp. 318–325.

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