1802 in literature

The year 1802 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

 * 4 October - William Wordsworth marries Mary Hutchinson.
 * 13 November - The first play in English to be explicitly called a melodrama ("melodrame") is performed in London, Thomas Holcroft's Gothic A Tale of Mystery (an unacknowledged translation of de Pixerécourt's Cœlina, ou, l'enfant du mystère) at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.
 * 15 November - Washington Irving makes his first appearance in print at age nineteen, submitting observational letters to the New York Morning Chronicle under the name Jonathan Oldstyle.
 * Jippensha Ikku begins work on the first of the satirical novels, Shank's Mare.

New books

 * François-René de Chateaubriand - René
 * Elizabeth Craven - The Soldiers of Dierenstein
 * Elizabeth Gunning - The Farmer's Boy
 * Jane Harvey - Warkfield Castle
 * Rachel Hunter - The History of the Grubthorpe Family
 * Isabella Kelly - The Baron's Daughter
 * Francis Lathom - Astonishment!!!
 * Mary Meeke
 * Independence
 * Midnight Weddings
 * Theodore Melville - The White Knight
 * Susannah Oakes - The Rules of the Forest
 * Mary Pilkington - The Accusing Spirit
 * Anne Louise Germaine de Stael -Delphine
 * Sir Walter Scott - The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
 * Harriet Ventum - Justina

New drama

 * Charles-Guillaume Étienne - Les Deux Mères

Non-fiction

 * Jeremy Bentham - Civil War and Penal Legislation
 * François-René de Chateaubriand - The Genius of Christianity
 * John Debrett - first edition of Debrett's Peerage
 * John Home - History of the Rebellion of 1745 -
 * Malcolm Laing - History of Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdoms
 * Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling - Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge
 * Daniel Webster - The Rights of Neutral Nations in Time of War

Births

 * January 9 - Catharine Parr Traill, author  (+  1899)
 * February 11 - Lydia Maria Child, author  (+  1880)
 * February 26 - Victor Hugo, author  (+  1885)
 * June 2 - Karl Lehrs, classical scholar
 * June 12 - Harriet Martineau, British writer (+ 1876)
 * July 10 - Robert Chambers, Scottish writer, publisher (+ 1871)
 * July 24 - Alexandre Dumas, père, novelist   (+  1870)
 * July 28 - Winthrop Mackworth Praed, English poet
 * August 25 - Nikolaus Lenau, poet
 * November 29 - Wilhelm Hauff, poet and novelist
 * December 23 - Sara Coleridge, author, daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Deaths

 * February 26 - Alexander Geddes, theologian
 * April 18 - Erasmus Darwin, poet, grandfather of Charles Darwin
 * June 5 - Johann Christian Gottlieb Ernesti, classical scholar
 * June 29 - Johann Jakob Engel
 * August 10 - Franz Aepinus, philosopher