1862 in literature

The year 1862 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * February - Ambrose Bierce joins the staff of General William Badcock Hazen.
 * July 4 - Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) extemporises the story that becomes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters on a rowing boat trip on The Isis from Oxford to Godstow.
 * November 26 - Charles Dodgson sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground to Alice Liddell.
 * Louisa May Alcott becomes a nurse at the Union hospital in Georgetown, D.C.
 * December 24 - William Dean Howells marries Elinor Mead at the American embassy in Paris.
 * James Russell Lowell begins writing for The North American Review.
 * Nikolai Chernyshevsky is imprisoned in St Petersburg and begins his novel What Is To Be Done?
 * Karl Heinrich Ulrichs begins writing about homosexuality under the pseudonym of "Numa Numantius".

New books

 * José de Alencar - Lucíola
 * Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Lady Audley's Secret
 * Camilo Castelo Branco - Amor de Perdição
 * Wilkie Collins - No Name
 * Thomas De Quincey - Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets
 * Fyodor Dostoevsky - The House of the Dead
 * Gustave Flaubert - Salammbo
 * Eugène Fromentin - Dominique
 * Edmond & Jules de Goncourt - Sister Philomene
 * Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
 * Henry Kingsley - Ravenshoe
 * George MacDonald - David Elginbrod
 * Elizabeth Stoddard - The Morgesons
 * William Makepeace Thackeray - The Adventures of Philip
 * Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons
 * Ellen Wood - The Channings

New drama

 * Émile Augier - Le Fils de Giboyer
 * Henrik Ibsen - Love's Comedy (first published)

Poetry

 * Pavlo Chubynsky - Ukraine's glory has not perished (later the Ukrainian national anthem)
 * George Meredith - Modern Love
 * Christina Rossetti - Goblin Market and other poems

Non-fiction

 * John William Draper - The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe
 * Julia Kavanagh - French Women of Letters
 * John Ruskin - Unto This Last

Births

 * January 24 - Edith Wharton (+ 1937)
 * May 1 - Marcel Prévost, dramatist (+ 1941)
 * May 15 - Arthur Schnitzler, dramatist and novelist (+ 1931)
 * June 6 - Sir Henry Newbolt, poet (+ 1938)
 * August 1 - Montague Rhodes James, scholar, short story writer (+ 1936)
 * August 6 - Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, historian (+ 1932)
 * August 29 - Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian poet, playwright (+ 1949)
 * September 27 - Francis Adams, poet, novelist, essayist and dramatist (+ 1893)
 * October 13 - Mary Kingsley, travel writer (+ 1900)
 * December 8 - Georges Feydeau, French playwright (+ 1921)
 * December 16 - John Fox, Jr., American novelist and journalist (+ 1919)
 * December 23 - Henri Pirenne, historian (+ 1935)

Deaths

 * January 11 - Jean Philibert Damiron, philosopher
 * February 24 - Bernhard Severin Ingemann, novelist and poet
 * April 6 - Fitz James O'Brien, science fiction pioneer
 * May 6 - Henry David Thoreau
 * May 25 - Johann Nestroy, dramatist
 * November 26 - Julia Pardoe, novelist and historian
 * November 30 - James Sheridan Knowles, dramatist and actor
 * date unknown - Charlotte Barton, children's author
 * date unknown - Thomas Jefferson Hogg, biographer