1812 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1812.

Events

• January 2 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lecture on Hamlet is given as part of a series of lectures on drama and Shakespeare; it has influenced Hamlet studies ever since.
• January 15 – Lord Byron takes his seat in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
• March 20 – First two cantos of Lord Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are published^[1] by John Murray in London. This sells out in five days, giving rise to Byron's comment "I awoke one morning and found myself famous".^[2]
• May–July – Auction in London of the library of the Duke of Roxburghe (d. 1804). On June 17 a presumed first edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, printed by Christopher Valdarfer of Venice in 1471, is sold to the Marquis of Blandford for £2,260, the highest price ever given for a book at this time; this is followed by a social meeting of bibliophiles under the chairmanship of 2nd Earl Spencer, the origin of the Roxburghe Club, formed by Thomas Frognall Dibdin.
• June 24 to December 14 – French invasion of Russia, which will form the climax of Tolstoy's 1869 novel War and Peace.
• October 10 – The rebuilt Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London opens.
• December 9–20 – Leigh Hunt is tried and convicted of libel for calling the Prince Regent "a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace" in The Examiner on March 22.^[3]
• December 26 – Frederick Marryat promoted to lieutenant after distinguished service at sea in the War of 1812.

New books

Fiction

• Amelia Beauclerc – The Castle of Tariffa
• Bridget Bluemantle – The Vindictive Spirit
• Sarah Burney – Traits of Nature
• Maria Edgeworth:
  • The Absentee
  • Emilie de Coulanges
  • Vivian
• Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès – Fantasmagoriana
• The Brothers Grimm – Grimm's Fairy Tales, volume 1 (Kinder- und Hausmärchen)
• Ann Hatton – The Fortress del Vechii
• Anthony Frederick Holstein – The Modern Kate
• Frances Margaretta Jacson (wrongly ascribed to Mary Brunton) – Things by their Right Names
• Charles Maturin – The Milesian Chief
• Henrietta Rouviere Mosse – Arrivals from India
• Rebecca Rush – Kelroy
• James and Horace Smith – Rejected Addresses (parodies)
• George Soane – The Eve of San Marco
• Louisa Stanhope – The Confessional of Valombre
• Elizabeth Thomas – The Vindictive Spirit
• Jane West – The Loyalists: An Historical Novel

Children and young adults

• Johann David Wyss – The Swiss Family Robinson
• Barbara Hofland – The Son of a Genius

Drama

• Joanna Baillie – Orra
• Theodor Körner
  • Die Braut ("The Bride")
  • Der grüne Domino ("The Green Domino")
  • Der Nachtwächter ("The Night Watchman")
• Adam Oehlenschläger – Stærkodder
• August von Kotzebue – Der arme Poet ("The Poor Poet")

Poetry

• Anna Laetitia Barbauld – Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
• Lord Byron – Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Devil's Walk: A Ballad
• James and Horace Smith (anonymously) – Rejected Addresses
• William Tennant – Anster Fair

Non-fiction

• John Galt – Cursory Reflections on Political and Commercial Topics
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Die objektive Logik
• Sir Richard Colt Hoare – The Ancient History of South Wiltshire
• W. M. Leake – Greece
• James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale – The Depreciation of the Paper-currency of Great Britain Proved
• John Nichols – The Literary Anecdotes of the 18th Century, volume 1
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – Declaration of Rights

Births

• February 7 – Charles Dickens, English novelist and editor (died 1870)
• February 19 – Zygmunt Krasiński, Polish poet (died 1859)
• May 7 – Robert Browning, English poet (died 1889)
• May 12 – Edward Lear, English humorous poet (died 1888)
• June 9 – Camilla Dufour Crosland, English writer and poet (died 1895)
• June 18 – Ivan Goncharov Russian novelist and critic (died 1891)
• July 5 – Antonio García Gutiérrez, Spanish dramatist (died 1884)
• August 22 – Geraldine Jewsbury, English novelist and woman of letters (died 1880)
• October 29 – Louise Granberg, Swedish playwright (died 1907)
• December 23 – Samuel Smiles, Scottish self-help author (died 1904)

Deaths

• February 13 – Jacques Marie Boutet, French dramatist and actor (born 1745)
• February 24 – Hugo Kołłątaj, Polish historian and philosopher (born 1750)
• March 24 – Johann Jakob Griesbach, German Biblical commentator (born 1745)
• May 12 – Martha Ballard, American diarist (born c. 1734)
• July 14 – Christian Gottlob Heyne, German librarian and classicist (born 1729)
• October 28 – Susanna Duncombe, English poet and painter (born 1725)
• November 11 – Platon Levshin, Russian church historian (born 1737)
• November 16 – John Walter, English founder of The Times, London (born c. 1738)
• December 22 – Pierre Henri Larcher, French classicist and archeologist (born 1726)
• Unknown date – Zalkind Hourwitz, Polish essayist (born 1738)

Awards

References

1. Palmer, Alan; Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 240–241. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
2. Spengler-Axiopoulos, Barbara (2006-07-01), Der skeptische Kosmopolit (in German), NZZ
3. Roe, Nicholas (2004). "Hunt, (James Henry) Leigh (1784–1859)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14195. Retrieved 2013-12-02. (subscription or UK public library membership required)