1862 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1862.

Events

 * February – Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети – old spelling Отцы и дѣти, Ottsy i dety, literally "Fathers and Children") is published by Russkiy Vestnik in Moscow.
 * March 30 or 31 – The first two volumes of Victor Hugo's epic historical novel Les Misérables appear in Brussels, followed on April 3 by Paris publication, with the remaining volumes on May 15. The first English-language translations, by Charles Edwin Wilbour, are published in New York on June 7, and by Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall, in London in October.
 * April 6 – Two months after joining the staff of General William Babcock Hazen, Ambrose Bierce joins in the Battle of Shiloh, later the subject of a memoir. Among those on the opposite side is the future journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who will also record his experiences.
 * April 28 – Thomas Hardy becomes an assistant to architect Arthur Blomfield.
 * June – Nikolai Chernyshevsky is imprisoned in Saint Petersburg and begins his novel What Is To Be Done?
 * June 4 – Henry Morton Stanley, now a "Galvanized Yankee", joins the Union Army; he is discharged 18 days later because of illness.
 * July – George Eliot's historical novel Romola begins serialization in Cornhill Magazine, the first time she has published a full-length book in this format. George Murray Smith of the publishers Smith, Elder & Co. has agreed a £7,000 advance for it.
 * July 1 – Moscow's first free public library opens as The Library of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumiantsev Museum, predecessor of the Russian State Library.
 * July 4 – Charles Dodgson (better known as by his later pseudonym Lewis Carroll) extemporises a story for 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters on a rowing trip on The Isis from Oxford to Godstow. The story becomes a manuscript titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground and is published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
 * September 23 – Leo Tolstoy marries Sophia (Sonya) Andreevna Behrs, 16 years his junior, in Moscow, having given her a diary detailing his previous sexual relations.
 * November 26 – Charles Dodgson sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground to Alice Liddell.
 * November 29 – Serialization of The Notting Hill Mystery by "Charles Felix" (probably Charles Warren Adams) commences in Once A Week (London), with illustrations by George du Maurier; it is seen as the first full-length detective novel in English.
 * December – Louisa May Alcott becomes a nurse at the Union hospital in Georgetown
 * December 24 – William Dean Howells marries Elinor Mead at the American Embassy in Paris.

Uncertain dates
 * James Russell Lowell begins writing for The North American Review.
 * Karl Heinrich Ulrichs begins writing about homosexuality under the pseudonym of "Numa Numantius".

Fiction

 * José de Alencar – Lucíola
 * Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Lady Audley's Secret
 * Camilo Castelo Branco – Amor de Perdição
 * Wilkie Collins – No Name
 * Fyodor Dostoevsky – The House of the Dead (Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvogo doma, book publication)
 * George Eliot – Romola (serialization)
 * Gustave Flaubert – Salammbo
 * Eugène Fromentin – Dominique
 * The Goncourt brothers (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt) – Sister Philomene (Sœur Philomène)
 * Victor Hugo – Les Misérables
 * Henry Kingsley – Ravenshoe
 * George MacDonald – David Elginbrod
 * Watts Phillips – The Honour of the Family
 * Fritz Reuter – From My Farming Days
 * John Skelton – Thalatta, or the Great Commoner
 * Elizabeth Stoddard – The Morgesons
 * William Makepeace Thackeray – The Adventures of Philip
 * Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy – Prince Serebrenni (Князь Серебряный)
 * Anthony Trollope – Orley Farm (publication completed)
 * Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons
 * Mrs. Henry Wood – The Channings

Children and young people

 * Frances Freeling Broderip – Tale of the Toys, Told by Themselves
 * Catherine Crowe – The Adventures of a Monkey
 * F. W. Farrar – St. Winifred's or The World of School
 * Henrietta Keddie (as Sarah Tytler) – Papers for Thoughtful Girls, with illustrative sketches of some girls' lives
 * Charlotte Yonge
 * Countess Kate
 * The Stokesley Secret

Drama

 * Émile Augier – Le Fils de Giboyer
 * María Bibiana Benítez – La Cruz del Morro (The Cross of El Morro)
 * Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson – Sigurd Slembe (Sigurd the Bastard, trilogy, published)
 * Henrik Ibsen – Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie, first published)
 * Watts Phillips – His Last Victory
 * Edmund Yates – Invitations

Poetry

 * Pavlo Chubynsky – "Shche ne vmerla Ukraina" (Ukraine's glory has not perished, later the text of the Ukrainian national anthem)
 * Henrik Ibsen – Terje Vigen
 * George Meredith – Modern Love
 * Christina Rossetti – Goblin Market and other poems

Non-fiction

 * John Hill Burton – The Book-Hunter
 * Thomas De Quincey – Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets
 * John William Draper – The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe
 * Theodor Fontane – Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, volume 1, Die Grafschaft Ruppin
 * Julia Kavanagh
 * English Women of Letters
 * French Women of Letters
 * George Perkins Marsh – The Origin and History of the English Language
 * John Ruskin – Unto This Last
 * Elizabeth Missing Sewell – Impressions of Rome, Florence, and Turin
 * John Skelton – Nugæ Criticæ
 * Samuel Smiles – Lives of the Engineers (5 volumes)
 * Leo Tolstoy – "The School at Yasnaya Polyana"

Births
[July 16] [Ida B. Wells], American journalist and novelist (Died 1931[1931 in literature|1931])
 * January 24 – Edith Wharton, American novelist (died 1937)
 * February 17 – Mori Ōgai (森 鷗外), Japanese army surgeon, poet, translator and realist fiction writer (died 1922)
 * April 11 – Lurana W. Sheldon, American author and newspaper editor (died 1945)
 * May 1 – Marcel Prévost, French dramatist (died 1941)
 * May 9 – Hugh Stowell Scott (Henry Seton Merriman), English novelist (died 1903)
 * May 15 – Arthur Schnitzler, Austrian dramatist and novelist (died 1931)
 * June 6 – Henry Newbolt, English poet (died 1938)
 * June 18 – Carolyn Wells, American novelist and poet (died 1942)
 * August 1 – Montague Rhodes James, English scholar and short story writer (died 1936)
 * August 2 – Paul Bujor, Romanian politician, zoologist and short story writer (died 1952)
 * August 6 – Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, English historian (died 1932)
 * August 21 – Emilio Salgari, Italian adventure novelist (suicide 1911)
 * August 29 – Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian poet and playwright (died 1949)
 * September 2 – Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉 覚三), Japanese writer on the arts (died 1913)
 * September 27 – Francis Adams, Anglo-Australian poet, novelist and dramatist (died 1893)
 * October 13 – Mary Kingsley, English travel writer (died 1900)
 * November 15 – Gerhart Hauptmann, German dramatist, novelist and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (died 1946)
 * December 8 – Georges Feydeau, French farceur (died 1921)
 * December 16 – John Fox, Jr., American novelist and journalist (died 1919)
 * December 23 – Henri Pirenne, Belgian historian (died 1935)
 * date unknown — Jessie King, Scottish essayist, poet, journalist (year of death unknown)

Deaths

 * January 11 – Jean Philibert Damiron, French philosopher (born 1794)
 * February 24 – Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Danish novelist and poet (born 1789)
 * February 27 (February 16 O.S.) – Constantin Sion, Moldavian polemicist, genealogist and literary forger (born 1795)
 * April 6 – Fitz James O'Brien, Irish-American science fiction pioneer (born 1828)
 * May 6 – Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher (born 1817)
 * May 25 – Johann Nestroy, Austrian dramatist (born 1801)
 * August 27 – Thomas Jefferson Hogg, English biographer (born 1792)
 * November 26 – Julia Pardoe, English novelist and historian (born 1806)
 * November 30 – James Sheridan Knowles, Irish dramatist and actor (born 1784)
 * December 17 – Katherine Thomson, writing as Grace Wharton, English novelist and historian (born 1797)

Awards

 * Gaisford Prize – Robert William Raper (Trinity) for comic iambic verse: Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II, Act 4, Sc. 3
 * Newdigate Prize – Arthur C. Auchmuty, "Julian the Apostate"