1802 in literature

Events

• April 15 – William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth walk by Ullswater and see a belt of daffodils, which inspires his poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", written two years later.
• April 19 – Joseph Grimaldi first presents his white-faced clown character "Joey", at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London.
• Summer – Adam Oehlenschläger writes at one sitting the poem "Guldhornene", introducing Romanticism into Danish poetry.
• July 31 – William Wordsworth, leaving London for Dover and Calais with Dorothy, witnesses an early morning scene he captures in a Petrarchan sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge". In Calais, he will meet his 9-year-old illegitimate daughter Caroline for the first time.
• October 4 – William Wordsworth marries Mary Hutchinson at Brompton, Scarborough.
• October 10 – The Edinburgh Review, a reforming quarterly, is first published.
• November 13 – The first play in English explicitly called a melodrama is performed in London: Thomas Holcroft's Gothic A Tale of Mystery, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.
• November 15 – Washington Irving makes a first appearance in print at the age of nineteen, with observational letters to the New York Morning Chronicle under the name Jonathan Oldstyle.
• December 2–3 – Jane Austen accepts, then rejects, a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither at his Hampshire home.

• Henry Boyd completes the first full English translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.
• Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron publishes Oupneck'hat in Latin, the first translation of the Upanishads into a Western language.
• The first part of Jippensha Ikku's picaresque novel Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige is published in Japan.

  New books

Fiction

• François-René de Chateaubriand – René
• Elizabeth Craven – The Soldiers of Dierenstein
• John Gilchrist – Hindee Story Teller
• Elizabeth Gunning – The Farmer's Boy
• Jane Harvey – Warkfield Castle
• Rachel Hunter – The History of the Grubthorpe Family
• Isabella Kelly – The Baron's Daughter
• Francis Lathom – Astonishment
• Mary Meeke
• *Independence
• *Midnight Weddings
• Mary Pilkington – The Accusing Spirit
• Anne Louise Germaine de Stael – Delphine
• Jane West – The Infidel Father

  Drama

• Charles-Guillaume Étienne – Les Deux Mères
• Heinrich Joseph von Collin – Coriolan

  Poetry

• Walter Scott, ed., anonymously – Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

  Non-fiction

• Saul Ascher – Ideen zur natürlichen Geschichte der politischen Revolutionen
• Jeremy Bentham – Civil War and Penal Legislation
• Jacob Boehme – Les Trois Principes de l'Essence Divine
• François-René de Chateaubriand – Génie du christianisme
• John Debrett – Debrett's Peerage
• John Home – History of the Rebellion of 1745
• Malcolm Laing – History of Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdoms
• Louis Claude de Saint-Martin – Le Ministère de l'homme-esprit
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling – Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge
• Joanna Southcott – The Strange Effects of Faith; with Remarkable Prophecies
• Noah Webster – The Rights of Neutral Nations in Time of War

  Births

• January 9 – Catharine Parr Traill, English-Canadian memoirist and children's author
• February 11 – Lydia Maria Child, American abolitionist, activist, novelist, and journalist
• February 26 – Victor Hugo, French novelist and poet
• June 2 – Karl Lehrs, German classicist
• June 12 – Harriet Martineau, English social theorist
• July 10 – Robert Chambers, Scottish writer and publisher
• July 24 – Alexandre Dumas, père, French novelist
• July 28 – Winthrop Mackworth Praed, English poet
• August 14 - Letitia Elizabeth Landon, English poet and novelist
• August 25 – Nikolaus Lenau, Hungarian-born German poet
• November 29 – Wilhelm Hauff, German poet and novelist
• December 8 – Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet
• December 23 – Sara Coleridge, English poet and translator
• December 31 – Richard Henry Horne, English poet, critic and journalist, and public official in Australia

  Deaths

• February 26 – Alexander Geddes, Scottish theologian, scholar and priest
• April 18 – Erasmus Darwin, English poet and natural philosopher
• June 5 – Johann Christian Gottlieb Ernesti, German classicist
• June 20 – Sophia Burrell, English poet and dramatist
• June 29 – Johann Jakob Engel, German teacher and writer
• August 10 – Franz Aepinus, German natural philosopher
• December 27 – Thomas Cadell, English bookseller and publisher
• Unknown date – John Pope, American soldier and travel writer