Events
- January – Vanity Fair: Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society begins serial publication in Punch magazine (London) in yellow covers, with illustrations by the author, William Makepeace Thackeray, writing for the first time in his own name.
- March–April – Ivan Goncharov's debut novel A Common Story («Обыкновенная история», Obyknovennaya istorya) is published in Sovremennik (Saint Petersburg).
- March 20 – The String of Pearls , probably written by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, concludes its serial publication in the 'penny dreadful' The People's Periodical issued by Edward Lloyd in London, begun in November 1846. This is the first literary appearance of Sweeney Todd. [1]
- April – Robert Browning settles with his wife and fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Florence.
- June
- Elizabeth Gaskell's first published work of fiction, the story "Life in Manchester: Libbie Marsh's Three Eras", appears in Howitt's Journal of Literature and Popular Progress [2] under the pen name Cotton Mather Mills.
- Hans Christian Andersen begins his first visit to Britain, during which he meets Charles Dickens.
- June 10 – The fictional date at the end of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is presumed to be that of the novel's completion. [3]
- July – The London publisher Thomas Cautley Newby accepts for publication Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey . [3]
- August 7–24 – Charlotte Brontë completes Jane Eyre at Haworth and sends the manuscript to her publisher, who has rejected The Professor . [4]
- September – Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, probably written by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Preskett Prest, having been published serially since 1845 as a 'penny dreadful' by Edward Lloyd in London, is first issued in book format. It introduces many of the tropes of vampire fiction. [1]
- September 16 – William Shakespeare's house of birth in Stratford-upon-Avon in England is bought by the United Shakespeare Company for preservation. [5] This year also, Schiller's house in Weimar is opened to the public as a museum.
- October 19 – Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is published (as "an autobiography, edited by Currer Bell") in London by Smith, Elder & Co. in 3 volumes. [3]
- November – Dmitry Grigorovich's anti-serfdom novel Anton Goremyka («Антон-горемыка», "Luckless Anton") is published in Sovremennik with its politically sensitive last scene rewritten by a censor.
- November 1 – John Maddison Morton's one-act farce Box and Cox (adapted from the French) opens at the Lyceum Theatre, London (under the new management of Madame Vestris and her husband Charles James Mathews) with John Pritt Harley and John Baldwin Buckstone in the title roles.
- December 14 – Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey are published in a three-volume set under the pen names of Ellis and Acton Bell respectively, in London by T. C. Newby. [6] Wuthering Heights will be Emily's only published novel, as she dies a year later, aged 30.
- unknown date – The London publisher E. Churton brings out the first six of George Sand's books to be issued in English, as translated by Matilda Hays, Eliza Ashurst and Rev. Edmund Larken. [7]