1849 in literature

The year 1849 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * La Tribune des Peuples, a pan-European romantic nationalist periodical, is published between March and November by Adam Mickiewicz.
 * Who's Who is published for the first time.
 * Honoré de Balzac travels to Poland to meet Eveline Hanska, whom he will marry shortly before his death.
 * Philip Massinger's play Believe as You List receives its first publication, 218 years after its theatrical premier.
 * Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail-Coach appears in the October and December issues of Blackwood's Magazine.
 * November 14 - A public festival is held in Denmark to celebrate the 70th birthday of Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger.

New books

 * William Harrison Ainsworth - The Lancashire Witches
 * Charlotte Brontë - Shirley
 * François-René de Chateaubriand - Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
 * Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
 * Fyodor Dostoevsky - Netochka Nezvanova
 * Catherine Gore - The Diamond and the Pearl
 * Charles Kingsley - Alton Locke
 * Herman Melville
 * Mardi
 * Redburn
 * Mayne Reid - The Rifle Rangers
 * G. W. M. Reynolds - The Bronze Statue
 * George Sand - Little Fadette
 * James Anthony Froude - The Nemesis of Faith

New drama

 * Christian Friedrich Hebbel - Der Rubin
 * Gaspar Núñez de Arce - Amor y Orgullo
 * Eugène Scribe - Adrienne Lecouvreur

Poetry

 * Matthew Arnold - The Strayed Reveller
 * Edgar Allan Poe - Annabel Lee, Eldorado, The Bells

Non-fiction

 * John Mitchell Kemble - History of the Saxons in England
 * Francis Parkman - The Oregon Trail
 * John Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture
 * Henry David Thoreau - Resistance to Civil Government
 * George Ticknor - A History of Spanish Literature
 * Søren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death

Births

 * January 22 - August Strindberg, Swedish dramatist (d. 1912)
 * February 18 - Alexander Kielland, Norwegian novelist (d. 1906)
 * July 22 - Emma Lazarus, poet (d. 1887)
 * August 23 - William Henley, British poet (d. 1903)
 * October 7 - James Whitcomb Riley, poet (d. 1916)
 * November 24 - Frances Hodgson Burnett, children's writer (d. 1924)

Deaths

 * January 6 - Hartley Coleridge, poet and critic
 * February 8 - France Prešeren, poet
 * May 22 - Maria Edgeworth, novelist
 * May 28 - Anne Brontë, novelist and poet
 * July 7 - Goffredo Mameli, poet
 * July 25 - James Kenney, dramatist
 * October 7 - Edgar Allan Poe, poet, short story writer, and critic