1872 in literature

The year 1872 in literature involved some significant new books.

Events

 * Paul Verlaine abandons his family to go to London with Arthur Rimbaud.
 * The Federation of Madrid expels all signatories of a subversive article in La Emancipación (including Paul Lafargue).
 * George MacDonald goes on a lecture tour of the United States.
 * Rose la Touche rejects John Ruskin for the last time.
 * Lafcadio Hearn becomes a reporter on the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer.

New books

 * Machado de Assis - Ressurreição
 * R. D. Blackmore - The Maid of Sker
 * Mary Elizabeth Braddon - To the Bitter End
 * Rhoda Broughton
 * Good-bye, Sweetheart!
 * Poor Pretty Bobby
 * Samuel Butler -Erewhon
 * Edward George Bulwer-Lytton - The Parisians
 * Wilkie Collins - Poor Miss Finch
 * Mary Coolidge - What Katy Did
 * Alphonse Daudet - Tartarin de Tarascon
 * Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Possessed
 * Alexandre Dumas, père - Création et Rédemption
 * Thomas Hardy - Under the Greenwood Tree
 * Mór Jókai
 * The Dark Diamonds
 * The Man with the Golden Touch
 * Sheridan Le Fanu -
 * Carmilla
 * In a Glass Darkly
 * Margaret Oliphant - At His Gates
 * Bayard Taylor - Beauty and The Beast, and Tales of Home
 * Anthony Trollope - The Golden Lion of Granpere
 * Jules Verne
 * The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa
 * The Fur Country
 * Emile Zola - La Curée

New drama

 * Prosper Mérimée - La Chambre bleue (published posthumously)
 * August Strindberg - Master Olof
 * Ivan Turgenev - A Month in the Country (first performed)

Non-fiction

 * Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik)
 * Henry Wilson - History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, vols. 1 & 2

Births

 * January 31 - Zane Grey, Western novelist (+ 1939)
 * May 31 - Heath Robinson, British cartoonist/illustrator (+ 1944)
 * June 27 - Paul Laurence Dunbar (+ 1906)
 * August 24 - Max Beerbohm (+ 1956)

Deaths

 * January 21 - Franz Grillparzer, poet and dramatist
 * March 4- Johannes Carsten Hauch, poet
 * March 10 - Giuseppe Mazzini, philosopher
 * April 1 - Frederick Maurice, theologian
 * April 20 - Ljudevit Gaj, linguist and journalist
 * May 13 - Moritz Hartmann, poet
 * June 1 - Charles Lever, novelist
 * August 8 - Heinrich Abeken, theologian
 * October 21 - Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné, historian
 * November 16 - William Gilham, military writer
 * December 23 - Théophile Gautier, poet, novelist