1859 in literature

The year 1859 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * George Eliot's novel Adam Bede is accused of being the "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and was consequently withdrawn from libraries.
 * 30 April - Charles Dickens's new weekly magazine All the Year Round is published for the first time, succeeding Household Words.

New books

 * R. M. Ballantyne -The World of Ice
 * Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
 * Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Village of Stepanchikovo
 * George Eliot
 * Adam Bede
 * The Lifted Veil
 * Ivan Goncharov - Oblomov
 * Mary Jane Holmes - Dora Deane
 * Hector Malot - Les Amants
 * George Meredith - The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
 * Viktor Rydberg - The Last Athenian
 * Harriet Beecher Stowe - ''The Minister's Wooing
 * Leo Tolstoy - Family Happiness
 * Ivan Turgenev - Home of the Gentry (Дворянское гнездо)
 * Harriet E. Wilson - Our Nig

New drama

 * Dion Boucicault - The Octoroon
 * Dinabandhu Mitra - Nil Darpan
 * Alexander Ostrovsky - The Storm
 * Aleksey Pisemsky - Gorkaya sudbina (A Bitter Fate)

Poetry

 * Edward Fitzgerald -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
 * Alfred Tennyson - Idylls of the King

Non-fiction

 * Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
 * William Henry Harvey - Phycologia Australica
 * Washington Irving - The Life of George Washington, Volume 5
 * Søren Kierkegaard - The Point of View of My Work as an Author (published posthumously; first full publication)
 * Karl Marx -  Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
 * John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
 * Samuel Smiles - Self Help

Births

 * March 8 - Kenneth Grahame, children's author (d. 1932)
 * March 26 - A. E. Housman, poet (d. 1936)
 * May 2 - Jerome K. Jerome, humorous writer (d. 1927)
 * May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and prolific writer (d. 1930)
 * June 8 – Mary Cholmondeley, English writer (d. 1925)
 * August 4 - Knut Hamsun, Nobel-Prize-winning author (d. 1952)
 * September 26 - Irving Bacheller, journalist and writer (d. 1950)
 * October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature (d. 1941)
 * December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Russo-Polish initiator of Esperanto (d. 1917)

Deaths

 * January 20 - Bettina von Arnim, novelist
 * January 21 - Henry Hallam, historian
 * February 13 - Eliza Acton, cookbook author
 * April 14 - Lady Morgan, novelist
 * April 16 - Alexis de Tocqueville, historian and political author
 * April 29 - Dionysius Lardner, scientific writer
 * July 23 - Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, poet
 * September 2 - Delia Bacon, Shakespearean scholar
 * October 4 - Karl Baedeker, publisher
 * November 7 - Auguste Hilarion, politician and writer
 * November 16 - William Spalding, literary critic
 * November 20 - Mountstuart Elphinstone, historian
 * November 28 - Washington Irving, author
 * December 8 - Thomas de Quincey, opium-eating author
 * December 16 - Wilhelm Grimm, collector of fairy-tales
 * December 28 - Thomas Macaulay, poet, historian and politician