1866 in literature

The year 1866 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * Ludwig Anzengruber returns to Vienna after working as a travelling actor.
 * Luigi Capuana becomes theatre critic for Italian newspaper The Nation.
 * Two new American magazines for children, The Little Corporal and Children's Hour, publish their first issues.

New books

 * R. D. Blackmore - Cradock Nowell
 * Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay -Kapalkundala
 * Wilkie Collins - Armadale
 * John Esten Cooke - Surry of Eagle's-Nest
 * Alphonse Daudet - Lettres de mon moulin
 * Fyodor Dostoevsky
 * Crime and Punishment
 * The Gambler
 * Alexandre Dumas, fils - L'Affaire Clemenceau
 * George Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical
 * John William De Forest - Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
 * Émile Gaboriau - The Lerouge Affair
 * Victor Hugo - Les Travailleurs de la Mer ("The Toilers of the Sea")
 * George MacDonald - Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood
 * Margaret Oliphant - Miss Marjoribanks
 * Ouida - Chandos
 * Anthony Trollope - Nina Balatka (published anonymously initially - Trollope was interested in discovering whether his books sold on their own merits or as a consequence of the author's name and reputation)
 * José Milla y Vidaurre - La Hija del Adelantado

New drama

 * Dion Boucicault - Rip van Winkle or The Sleep of Twenty Years
 * Alexandre Dumas, fils - Heloise Paranquet
 * Henrik Ibsen - Brand

Poetry

 * Algernon Charles Swinburne - Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)
 * Paul Verlaine - Poèmes saturniens

Non-fiction

 * William Wells Brown - The Negro in the American Rebellion
 * Friedrich Albert Lange - Geschichte des Materialismus
 * Charles Haddon Spurgeon - The Wordless Book

Births

 * January 29 - Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize winning author, (+ 1944)
 * February 24 - Cyril Arthur Pearson, publisher (+ 1921)
 * July 28 - Beatrix Potter, Children's author  (+ 1943)
 * May 2 - Paul Kretschmer, linguist (+ 1956)
 * September 7 - Tristan Bernard, writer (+ 1947)
 * August 31 - Elizabeth von Arnim, novelist (+ 1941)
 * September 21 - H. G. Wells, science fiction and romantic novelist (+ 1946)
 * November 21 - Dusé Mohamed Ali, political activist, journalist and dramatist (+ 1945)
 * date unknown - Dora Sigerson Shorter, poet (+ 1918)

Deaths

 * January 23 - Thomas Love Peacock, satirist
 * February 2 - Francois Xavier Garneau, poet and historian
 * March 6 - William Whewell, philosopher and theologian
 * March 29 - John Keble, poet
 * June 16 - Joseph Méry, satirist and librettist
 * August 1 - Luigi Carlo Farini, historian
 * August 12 - Philip Stanhope Worsley, poet
 * September 10 - Charles Maclaren, first editor of The Scotsman
 * September 14 - Léon Gozlan, novelist and dramatist
 * September 19 - Christian Hermann Weisse, philosopher