1823 in literature

The year 1823 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

 * Clement Clarke Moore's poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas introduces the character named "Santa Claus".
 * The discovery of the First Quarto edition of 1603 of William Shakespeare's Hamlet (a so-called "bad quarto") causes great excitement within the scholarly community.
 * Thomas De Quincey's classic essay On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth appears in the October issue of The London Magazine.

New books

 * James Fenimore Cooper - The Pioneers
 * Claire de Duras - Ourika
 * John Galt - The Entail
 * Thomas Gaspey - Monks of Leadenhead
 * Sarah Green - The Nieces
 * Jane Harvey - Mountalyth
 * William Hazlitt - Liber Amoris
 * Grace Kennedy – Father Clement
 * Caroline Lamb - Ada Reis
 * Mary Meeke - What Shall Be, Shall Be
 * John Neal – Logan
 * Quintin Poyney - The Wizard Priest and the Witch
 * Sir Walter Scott - Quentin Durward
 * Mary Shelley - Valperga
 * John Wilson - The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay

New drama

 * Eugène Scribe - Le Menteur Veridique
 * Eugène Scribe - The Heiress (L'Héritière) for the Théâtre du Gymnase
 * Franz Grillparzer - The Fortune and Fall of King Ottokar (König Ottokars Glück und Ende)

Poetry

 * Alphonse de Lamartine - Nouvelles méditations poétiques
 * Percy Bysshe Shelley - Posthumous Poems

Non-fiction

 * John Franklin - Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea
 * Louis Thiers - Histoire de la Révolution française

Births

 * January 1 - Sándor Petőfi, poet (d. 1849)
 * February 27 - Ernest Renan, French philosopher and writer (d. 1892)
 * March 20 - Ned Buntline, publisher, writer, (d. 1886)
 * August 13 - Goldwin Smith, historian and journalist (d. 1910)
 * October 6 - George Henry Boker, poet and playwright (d. 1890)

Deaths

 * February 7 - Ann Radcliffe, novelist (born 1764)
 * February 21 - Charles Wolfe, poet (born 1791)
 * April 10 - Karl Leonhard Reinhold, philosopher (born 1757)
 * August 19 - Robert Bloomfield, poet (born 1766)
 * August 20 - Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, encyclopedia publisher and editor (born 1772)
 * September 11 - David Ricardo, political economist (born 1772)
 * November 9 - Vasily Kapnist, poet and dramatist (b. 1758)