Events
- January – Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? , the first of his Palliser novels, begins to appear in monthly parts in London. Trollope completes it on April 28 and the first volume is published as a book in September by Chapman & Hall. In April, The Small House at Allington concludes publication in the Cornhill Magazine and is published in book form by George Smith.
- January 2–April 16 – James Payn publishes his most popular story, Lost Sir Massingberd, in Chambers's Journal . [1] He follows it in the magazine (August 6 – December 24) by Married Beneath Him.
- February 20 – Painter George Frederic Watts marries his 16-year-old model, the actress Ellen Terry, 30 years his junior, in London. She elopes less than a year later. [2]
- March (dated January–February) – The first issue of the Russian literary magazine Epoch («Эпо́ха»), edited by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his brother Mikhail (died July 22), is published in Saint Petersburg. This and the March and April issues contain the first publication of Fyodor's existential novella Notes from Underground («Записки из подполья», Zapiski iz podpol'ya).
- April 10 – Publisher William Ticknor dies of pneumonia in Philadelphia while on a trip with Nathaniel Hawthorne for the sake of the latter's health.
- April 23 – The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (German Shakespeare Society) is founded [3] as the first scientific and cultural association of its type in Weimar, and one of the world's oldest continuing literary societies.
- April – Charles Baudelaire leaves Paris for Belgium in the hope of resolving his financial difficulties.
- May 26 – Alexandre Dumas, fils marries Nadejda Naryschkine. His father, Alexandre Dumas, père, returns to Paris from Italy.
- May – The first Lithuanian press ban is imposed in the Russian Empire.
- June 19 – Henrik Ibsen arrives in Rome in a self-imposed exile from Norway that will last for 27 years.
- June 27 – Ambrose Bierce is wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.
- July 2 – The Female Detective is published under the pseudonym "Andrew Forrester, Junior" in London, presenting the first female professional detective in fiction. Around December, she is followed by Mrs Paschal in Revelations of a Lady Detective, published anonymously by William Stephens Hayward. R. D. Blackmore's first published work of fiction, the sensation novel Clara Vaughan , also issued anonymously this year in England, has a heroine solving a mystery.
- September – A debate at the Royal Geographical Society between Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke is prevented by Speke's suicide (or accidental shooting).
- November 10 – The poet and critic John Addington Symonds the younger marries Janet Catherine North.
- November 25 – The brothers Edwin Booth (playing Brutus), John Wilkes Booth (who carries out the assassination of Abraham Lincoln the following year, playing Mark Antony) and Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. (playing Cassius) make their only appearance onstage together, in a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (in the year of the playwright's birth tricentennial) at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City, staged to raise funds for a memorial to William Shakespeare in the city's Central Park.
- December – Sheridan Le Fanu's Gothic locked room mystery-thriller Uncle Silas completes its serialisation in his Dublin University Magazine as "Maud Ruthyn and Uncle Silas" and is published as a three-volume novel by Richard Bentley in London. [4]
- unknown date – The English former chess master Howard Staunton publishes a facsimile of the 1600 quarto text of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing , the first use of photolithography for such a book. [5]
