1861 in literature

Events

• March – Fyodor Dostoyevsky's monthly Vremya begins publication in Saint Petersburg under the nominal editorship of his brother Mikhail. Fyodor's novel The House of the Dead is first published in it this year.
• April 23 – Herbert Coleridge, first editor of what will become the Oxford English Dictionary, dies aged 30 of tuberculosis in London. Frederick James Furnivall is appointed to succeed him.
• May/July – The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce becomes The Times of India.
• June 29 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning dies aged 55 in the arms of her husband and fellow poet Robert Browning in Florence; on July 1 she is buried in the Protestant cemetery there. Robert leaves the city soon afterwards.
• July – Sheridan Le Fanu becomes editor and proprietor of the Dublin University Magazine. From October he begins in it the serialization of his novel The House by the Churchyard.
• July 19–24 – Rev. James Long is tried in Calcutta for defamation in distributing a translation of Dinabandhu Mitra's play Nil Darpan.
• August 3 – Serialization of Charles Dickens's Bildungsroman Great Expectations in his magazine All the Year Round is concluded; in October it is published complete in three volumes by Chapman & Hall in London.
• September 14 – Gottfried Keller becomes municipal secretary of his home town of Zurich.
• September 19 – Mrs. Henry Wood's 'sensation novel' East Lynne is published in London as a three-volume novel, as its serialization is concluded in The New Monthly Magazine. This year also sees its first theatrical adaptation, as Edith, or The Earl's Daughter, staged in New York City.
• October 20 – Poet and dramatist Apollo Korzeniowski is arrested for his political activities and placed in the infamous Tenth Pavilion of Warsaw Citadel.

• Thirty-one-year-old John Edward Taylor the younger becomes sole editor and proprietor of the Manchester Guardian.
• The first modern New Zealand novel, Henry Butler Stoney's Taranaki: A Tale of the War, is published.

  New books

Fiction

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• *The Black Band
• *The Octoroon
• Frances Browne – My Share of the World
• Charles Dickens – Great Expectations
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – Humiliated and Insulted
• George Eliot – Silas Marner
• Josip Jurčič – Pripovedka o beli kači
• Balduin Möllhausen – Die Halbindianer
• Charles Reade – The Cloister and the Hearth
• Seeley Regester – Maum Guinea, and Her Plantation "Children", or, Holiday-week on a Louisiana Estate: a Slave Romance
• George Sand – Consuelo
• Walter Chalmers Smith – The Bishop's Walk
• William Makepeace Thackeray – The Adventures of Philip
• Anthony Trollope
• *Framley Parsonage
• *Orley Farm
• George J. Whyte-Melville – Market Harborough
• Mrs Henry Wood – East Lynne
• Charlotte M. Yonge – The Young Step-Mother

  Children

• R. M. Ballantyne – The Gorilla Hunters
• Mary Louise Peebles – The Little Captain

  Drama

• Henry James Byron – Aladdin, or, The Wonderful Scamp
• Léon Gozlan – La Pluie et le beau temps
• Alexander Griboyedov – Woe from Wit
• Imre Madách – The Tragedy of Man

  Poetry

• Charles Baudelaire – Les Fleurs du mal, 2nd edition
• Michael Madhusudan Dutt – Meghnad Badh Kabya
• Hymns Ancient and Modern
• Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald – Kalevipoeg
• F. T. Palgrave – Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics

  Non-fiction

• Isabella Beeton – Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
• Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle
• Harriet Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Eliphas Lévi – La Clef des grands mystères
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Writings on the U.S. Civil War
• Narmadashankar Dave – Narmakosh
• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – La Guerre et la paix

  Births

• January 6 – János Zsupánek, Slovene-Hungarian author and poet
• January 23 – Katharine Tynan, Irish-born novelist, poet and writer
• March 1 – Henry Harland, American novelist and editor
• March 10 – Pauline Johnson, Canadian poet
• April ? – Herminie Templeton Kavanagh, née McGibney, Anglo-Irish-American short story writer
• April 15 – Bliss Carman, Canadian-born poet
• May 5 – Sir John Edward Lloyd, Welsh historian
• May 7 – Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet and novelist
• May 13 – Margaret Marshall Saunders, Canadian author
• September 2 – Mircea Demetriade, Romanian poet and actor
• September 20 – Herbert Putnam, American Librarian of Congress
• October 16 – J. B. Bury, Irish historian
• November 8 – William Price Drury, English novelist, playwright and Royal Marines officer
• November 10 – Amy Levy, English novelist and essayist
• December 19 – Constance Garnett, née Black, English translator

  Deaths

• January 28 – Henri Murger, French novelist and poet
• January 29 – Catherine Gore, English novelist and dramatist
• February 20 – Eugène Scribe, French dramatist
• March 10 – Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian poet and artist
• April 1 – Lady Charlotte Bury, English novelist and diarist
• April 28 – Frances Mary Richardson Currer, English heiress and bibliophile
• May 23 – Edward Cardwell, English theologian
• June 7 – Patrick Brontë, Irish-born writer and cleric
• June 29 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet
• July 6 – Sir Francis Palgrave, English historian
• November 13 – Arthur Hugh Clough, English poet
• November 30
• *Alexander Gilchrist, English biographer
• *Theodor Mundt, German novelist and critic