1850 in literature

The year 1850 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) named Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, succeeding William Wordsworth.
 * Periodical Household Words begins publication
 * Henrik Ibsen's second play, The Burial Mound, is produced

New books

 * Wilkie Collins - Antonina
 * Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
 * Alexandre Dumas, fils - Tristan le Roux
 * Alexandre Dumas, père - The Black Tulip
 * Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
 * Caroline Lee Hentz
 * Linda
 * Rena, the Snowbird
 * Herman Melville - White-Jacket
 * Catharine Maria Sedgwick - Tales of City Life
 * Frank Smedley - Frank Fairleigh
 * Anthony Trollope - La Vendée
 * Susan Warner - The Wide, Wide World

New drama

 * Christian Friedrich Hebbel - Herodes and Mariamne
 * Henrik Ibsen - Catilina (Ibsen's first play, not performed until 1881)
 * Otto Ludwig - Der Erbförster
 * Ivan Turgenev - A Month in the Country

Poetry

 * Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Sonnets from the Portuguese
 * Robert Browning - Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day

Non-fiction

 * Ivar Aasen - Dictionary of the Norwegian Dialects
 * Frédéric Bastiat - The Law
 * Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men
 * Friedrich Engels - The Peasant War in Germany
 * Alexander Herzen - From Another Shore
 * Washington Irving - Mahomet and His Successors
 * Søren Kierkegaard - Practice in Christianity

Births

 * January 14 - Pierre Loti, novelist (d. 1923)
 * January 15 - Mihai Eminescu, poet (d. 1889)
 * February 8 - Kate Chopin, writer (d. 1904)
 * March 26 - Edward Bellamy, writer (d. 1898)
 * June 27 - Lafcadio Hearn, writer (d. 1904)
 * June 27 - Ivan Vazov, poet, novelist and playwright (d. 1921)
 * August 5 - Guy de Maupassant, writer (d. 1893)
 * September 2 - Eugene Field, poet and essayist (d. 1895)
 * November 5 - Ella Wheeler Wilcox, poet and journalist (d. 1919)
 * November 13 - Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist (d. 1894)

Deaths

 * January 20 - Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, poet and dramatist
 * April 7 - William Lisle Bowles, poet and critic
 * April 23 - William Wordsworth, poet
 * May 31 - Giuseppe Giusti, poet
 * July 14 - August Neander, theologian
 * July 19 - Sarah Margaret Fuller, writer
 * August 18 - Honoré de Balzac, novelist
 * August 22 - Nikolaus Lenau, poet
 * November 4 - Gustav Schwab, author
 * December 24 - Frédéric Bastiat, philosopher and author