1840 in literature

Events

• June – An amnesty to mark the accession of King Frederick William IV of Prussia frees the novelist Fritz Reuter from the Dömitz Fortress after two years' imprisonment on a charge of high treason.
• July 6 – Novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray independently attend the hanging outside Newgate Prison in London of the murderer François Benjamin Courvoisier, who blames the influence of W. Harrison Ainsworth's Newgate novel Jack Sheppard for his crime.
• August 10 – Fortsas hoax: Bibliophiles gather in Binche, Belgium for an auction of 52 unique, meticulously catalogued books from the collection of the late Comte de Fortsas. The Count, the books and the auction all prove fictitious.

• The Percy Society is established in Britain to publish scholarly editions of early works in English.
• William Martin publishes the first edition of Peter Parley's Annual, a periodical imitating earlier American works by Samuel Griswold Goodrich.

  New books

Fiction

• W. Harrison Ainsworth
• *Guy Fawkes
• *The Tower of London
• Henry Cockton – Valentine Vox
• James Fenimore Cooper – The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea
• Charles Dickens – The Old Curiosity Shop
• Alexandre Dumas, père – Otho the Archer
• Thomas Ingoldsby – The Ingoldsby Legends
• Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald – Plague of Wine
• Mikhail Lermontov – A Hero of Our Time
• Harriet Martineau – The Hour and the Man
• Prosper Mérimée – Colomba
• Edgar Allan Poe – Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• *Catherine
• *The Arabian Nights

  Children

• Esther Copley – Early Friendship. A Tale for Young People
• Frederick Marryat
• *Olla Podrida
• *Poor Jack

  Drama

• Namiki Gohei III – Kanjinchō
• Christian Hebbel – Judith
• Andreas Munch – Donna Clara
• Jose Zorilla – El Zapatero y el Rey

  Poetry

• Victor Hugo – Les Rayons et les Ombres
• Mikhail Lermontov – Mtsyri
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – "The Wreck of the Hesperus"
• Taras Shevchenko – Kobzar

  Non-fiction

• Louis Agassiz – Études sur les glaciers
• Richard Henry Dana Jr. – Two Years Before the Mast
• Pierre-Joseph Proudhon – What is Property? or, An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government
• Anton Schindler – Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven
• Agnes Strickland – Lives of the Queens of England
• Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
• Flora Tristan – Promenades dans Londres
• William Whewell – The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, founded upon their history

  Births

• January 18 – Henry Austin Dobson, English poet and essayist
• January 21 – Sophia Jex-Blake, English medical writer and pioneer female physician
• January 26 – Esther Tuttle Pritchard, American editor, educator, and missionary
• February 5 – Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Scottish writer and women's rights activist
• February 15 – Titu Maiorescu, Romanian culture critic, philosopher, and political figure
• April 2 – Émile Zola, French novelist
• May 1 – Cynthia S. Burnett, American editor, educator, and reformer
• June 2 – Thomas Hardy, English novelist and poet
• June – Emma L. Shaw, American editor
• July 2 – Ludwig Rosenthal, German antiquarian bookseller
• August 6 – Mildred Amanda Baker Bonham, American travel writer
• August 17 – Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, English poet and radical
• August 20 – Seraph Frissell, American physician and writer
• September 2
• *Emilia, Lady Dilke as Emily Francis Strong, English art historian
• *Giovanni Verga, Sicilian author
• September 19 – Helen Ekin Starrett, American author, magazine founder, and school founder
• September 27 – Rosa Nouchette Carey, English children's novelist
• October 23 – Mary Mathews Adams, Irish-born American writer and philanthropist
• November 8 – Esther E. Baldwin, American missionary and writer
• November 29 – Rhoda Broughton, Welsh novelist and short-story writer
• December 28 – Ioan Kalinderu, Romanian classical scholar, jurist and agriculturalist

  Deaths

• January 6 – Frances Burney, English novelist and diarist
• February 4 – Angélique de Rouillé, Belgian letter-writer
• July 7 – Nikolai Stankevich, Russian philosopher and poet
• August 25 – Karl Leberecht Immermann, German novelist and dramatist
• September – Emma Roberts, English travel writer and poet
• December 8 – Eliza Fenwick, English novelist and children's writer