1831 in literature

The year 1830 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

 * Amos Bronson Alcott marries Abby May.
 * Edgar Allan Poe takes up an appointment at the United States Military Academy, West Point.
 * François-René de Chateaubriand sacrifices his political career by refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to Louis-Philippe, and retires to write his memoirs.
 * James Mill becomes head of India House.
 * Victor Cousin is elected to the Académie française.
 * Barthold Georg Niebuhr's house burns down - but most of his books are saved.

New books

 * Nathaniel Ames - A Mariner's Sketches
 * Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton - Paul Clifford
 * James Fenimore Cooper - The Water-Witch
 * Oliver Wendell Holmes - Old Ironsides
 * Frederick Marryat - The King's Own
 * Thomas Love Peacock - Crotchet Castle
 * Anna Maria Porter - The Barony
 * Rosalia St. Clair - The Admiral and His Protégé
 * Sir Walter Scott
 * Auchindrane
 * The Doom of Devorgoil
 * Catharine Maria Sedgwick - A Tale of Our Times
 * Mary Shelley - The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
 * Louisa Stanhope - The Corsair's Bride
 * Stendhal - The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir)

"It was a dark and stormy night"
The famous opening line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel, Paul Clifford, published this year, begins:


 * "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

The author is today honored with the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

New drama

 * Henrik Hertz - Amor's Strokes of Genius
 * Aleksandr Pushkin - The Stone Guest

Poetry

 * Alphonse de Lamartine - Harmonies poétiques et religieuses
 * Alfred de Musset - Comtes d'Espagne et d'Italie
 * Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve - Les Consolations
 * Alfred Tennyson - Poems, Chiefly Lyrical

Non-fiction

 * Jeremy Bentham - Constitutional Code for All Nations
 * William Cobbett - Rural Rides
 * Jacob Grimm - Hymnorum veteris ecclesiae XXVI. inter pretatio theodisca
 * Thomas Moore - Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life
 * Joseph Smith, Jr. - The Book of Mormon

Births

 * March 15 - Paul Heyse, writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature 1910 (+ 1914)
 * March 18 - Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, historian (+ 1889)
 * April 6 - Eugène Rambert, Swiss author
 * May 20: Hector Malot, French writer of Without family (+ 1907)
 * July 22 - Richard Copley Christie, scholar
 * September 8 - Frédéric Mistral, poet
 * December 5 - Christina Rossetti (+ 1894) English poet
 * December 10 - Emily Dickinson, American poet (+ 1886)
 * December 17 - Jules de Goncourt, Prix Goncourt (+ 1870)

Deaths

 * January 17 - Wilhelm Waiblinger, poet (b. 1804)
 * February 15 - Ioane Bagrationi, encyclopedist (b. 1768)
 * February 20 - Robert Anderson, literary critic (b. 1750)
 * March 29 - James Rennell, historian and oceanographer (b. 1742)
 * June 28 - David Walker, abolitionist, author of the pamphlet Walker's Appeal (b. 1785)
 * August 20 - Vasily Pushkin, poet (b. 1766)
 * September 18 - William Hazlitt, British essayist (b. 1778)
 * December 8 - Benjamin Constant, liberal author (b. 1767)
 * December 31 - The comtesse de Genlis, dramatist and writer on education (b. 1746)
 * October 8 - Johann Gottfried Ebel, travel writer (b. 1764)
 * date unknown - Gustav von Ewers, legal historian (b. 1781)