1836 in literature

Events

• March 31 – The first monthly part of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens is issued in London. On April 20, the original illustrator, Robert Seymour, shoots himself and Dickens has more freedom to develop the story in his own way.
• April 2 – Dickens marries Catherine Hogarth at St Luke's Church, Chelsea. They honeymoon at Chalk, Kent.
• April 19 – Nikolai Gogol's satire The Government Inspector is premièred at the Alexandra Theatre in Saint Petersburg before the Emperor Nicholas I of Russia and first published there.
• August 20 – The legal deposit privilege in the U.K. is removed from the libraries of Sion College in London, the four universities in Scotland and King's Inns in Dublin and replaced by a government grant for the purchase of books.
• September – The Flinders Island Chronicle is founded in Australia, the first newspaper produced by indigenous Australians.
• October 23 – Honoré de Balzac's novel La Vieille Fille begins a 12-day serialization in the newly-established Paris newspaper La Presse, as the first novel serialized in the French press.
• November 6 – The Czech romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha, having overexerted himself in helping put out a fire, dies just before his 26th birthday of pneumonia in Litoměřice. His burial in a pauper's grave is held on the day of his intended wedding to Eleonora Šomková, about a month after the birth of their child.
• December – Charles Dickens first meets, in London, a lifelong friend, the biographer and critic John Forster.

• The Russian literary, social and political quarterly Sovremennik, edited by Alexander Pushkin, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It publishes Fyodor Tyutchev's poetry, and the fourth issue contains Pushkin's historical novel The Captain's Daughter.
• The first printed literature in Assyrian Neo-Aramaic is produced by Justin Perkins, an American Presbyterian missionary in Persia.
• The dissertation of the German writer Georg Büchner on the common barbel, Barbus barbus, "Mémoire sur le Système Nerveux du Barbeaux ", appears in Paris and Strasbourg. After receiving his doctorate, he is appointed in October by the University of Zurich as a lecturer in anatomy.

  New books

Fiction

• Hans Christian Andersen – O. T.
• Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed
• Honoré de Balzac
• *Le Lys dans la vallée
• *Facino Cane
• Alfred de Musset – La Confession d'un enfant du siècle
• Charles Dickens – The Pickwick Papers
• Théophile Gautier – "La Morte amoureuse"
• Louis Geoffroy – Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde
• William Nugent Glascock – Tales of a Tar, with characteristic Anecdotes
• Nikolai Gogol
• *"The Carriage"
• *"The Nose"
• Thomas Chandler Haliburton – The Clockmaker
• Washington Irving – Astoria
• Alexander Pushkin – The Captain's Daughter
• X. B. Saintine – Picciola
• Nathaniel Beverley Tucker
• *George Balcombe
• *The Partisan Leader

  Children

• Letitia Elizabeth Landon – Traits and Trials of Early Life
• William Holmes McGuffey – first McGuffey Readers
• Frederick Marryat
• *Japhet, in Search of a Father
• *Mr Midshipman Easy
• *The Pirate
• *The Three Cutters
• Agnes Strickland – Tales and Stories From History

  Drama

• Georg Büchner – Leonce and Lena
• Alexandre Dumas – Kean
• Nikolai Gogol – Leaving the Theater,
• Henrik Hertz – The Savings Bank

  Poetry

• Robert Browning – "Porphyria's Lover"
• Girolamo de Rada – Këngët e Milosaos
• Oliver Wendell Holmes – Poems
• Andreas Munch – Ephemerer

  Non-fiction

• Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature
• William Nugent Glascock – Naval Service, or Officers' Manual
• Washington Irving – Astoria
• Søren Kierkegaard – On the Polemic of Fædrelandet
• Claude François Lallemand – Des Pertes séminales involuntaires
• John Murray III – A Hand-book for Travellers on the Continent; being a guide through Holland, Belgium, Prussia and northern Germany, and along the Rhine from Holland to Switzerland
• A. W. N. Pugin – Contrasts
• G. W. M. Reynolds – Grace Darling
• Arthur Schopenhauer – Über den Willen in der Natur
• Catharine Parr Traill – The Backwoods of Canada

  Births

• January 27 – Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Austrian writer
• February 17 – Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Spanish Andalusian poet and short-story writer
• March 4 – Matilda Betham-Edwards, English novelist, poet and travel writer
• April 25 – Emily Sarah Holt, English novelist
• July 16 – Marietta Holley, American humorist
• August 25 – Bret Harte, American author
• August 27 – Lizzie P. Evans-Hansell, American novelist and short-story writer
• September 11 – Fitz Hugh Ludlow, American author
• September 22 – Emeline S. Burlingame, American editor and reformer
• November 4 – Annie Ryder Gracey, American writer and missionary
• November 11 – Thomas Bailey Aldrich, American poet and novelist
• November 18 – W. S. Gilbert, English humorist, playwright and librettist
• November 20 – Lucy Morris Chaffee Alden, American author, educator, and hymnwriter
• December 7 – Nellie Blessing Eyster, American journalist, writer, and reformer

  Deaths

• February 5 – Dorothy Kilner, English children's writer
• March 5 – William Taylor, English man of letters
• March 9 – Antoine Destutt de Tracy, French philosopher
• April 7 – William Godwin, English political writer and novelist
• September 5 – Ferdinand Raimund, Austrian playwright
• September 6 – Louisa Gurney Hoare, English diarist and writer on education
• September 12 – Christian Dietrich Grabbe, German playwright
• November 6 – Karel Hynek Mácha, Czech poet
• December 1 – Jozef Ignác Bajza, Slovak satirist

• Nathan Drake, English essayist and physician
• Don Vincente, Spanish ex-monk, bibliomaniac, book-thief and murderer, executed