1852 in literature

Events

• February 2 – Alexandre Dumas, fils's stage adaptation of his 1848 novel La Dame aux caméllias is premièred at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris.
• February 24 – Nikolai Gogol burns some of his manuscripts, including most of the second part of Dead Souls, telling acquaintances the action is a practical joke played on him by the Devil. He takes to his bed and dies a few days later.
• March – Serialization of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House begins; the September installment introduces the first detective in an English novel.
• March 8 – Nathaniel Hawthorn purchases The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts from Bronson Alcott.
• March 20 – Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is first published in book form, by John P. Jewett of Boston with illustrations by Hammatt Billings, rapidly establishing its position as the best-selling novel of the 19th century. The first British publication is in April followed by C. H. Clarke and Co.'s in May and John Cassell's serial issue with illustrations by George Cruikshank, together with pirated reprints from Routledge. The first dramatic adaptations appear on the New York stage from Autumn. This year also, Jewett publishes the first work of fiction in English by an African American, the escaped slave Frederick Douglass's novella The Heroic Slave, a heartwarming Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty.
• April – Samuel Orchart Beeton launches The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, the first British magazine aimed at a middle-class female readership.
• April 16 – Ivan Turgenev is imprisoned and exiled to his country estate over an obituary praising Gogol.
• April 24 – Wilkie Collins' first contribution to Household Words, "The traveller's story of a terribly strange bed", is an early example of crime fiction involving the police.
• August – Ivan Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches are published in book form in Russia while the author is in internal exile; the work is subsequently banned in the Russian Empire. The first major writing to gain him international recognition and influential in the Russian tradition of literary realism, the stories are notable for their sympathy for the privations of serfdom in Russia in the prelude to the emancipation reform of 1861.
• August 5 – Exiled French novelist Victor Hugo moves to Saint Helier on Jersey in the Channel Islands with his mistress Juliette Drouet.
• September 2 – The public library in Campfield, Manchester, England, is the first to offer free lending under the U.K. Public Libraries Act 1850; Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens are present at the opening ceremony.
• November
• *Leo Tolstoy's debut novel, Childhood, is published under the initials L. N. in this month's issue of the Saint Petersburg literary journal Sovremennik.
• *The Merchant of Venice becomes the first of Shakespeare's plays to be performed publicly in India in an Indian language, Gujarati, as Nathari Firangiz Thekani Avi presented by a Parsi company at Surat.
• November 23 – At the suggestion of English novelist Anthony Trollope, at this time an official of the British General Post Office, the first roadside pillar boxes in the British Isles are brought into public use in Saint Helier on Jersey in the Channel Islands.
• unknown dates
• *Pierre Larousse and Augustin Boyer found a publishing house in Paris.
• *Hanah Mullens' Karuna O Phulmonir Bibaran is the first Bengali novel. The first publication of Bengali plays also takes place this year: C. C. Gupta's Kirtivilas and Taracharan Sikdar's Bhadrarjun.
• probable – The first printing press in the Faeroe Islands is established.

  New books

Fiction

• Manuel Antônio de Almeida – Memoirs of a Police Sergeant
• Wilkie Collins – Basil: A Story of Modern Life
• Robert Criswell – "Uncle Tom's Cabin" Contrasted with Buckingham Hall, the Planter's Home
• Alphonse de Lamartine – Graziella
• Mary H. Eastman – Aunt Phillis's Cabin
• Baynard Rush Hall – Frank Freeman's Barber Shop
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• *The Blithedale Romance
• *The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales
• Caroline Lee Hentz
• *Eoline
• *Marcus Warland
• Herman Melville –
• Susanna Moodie – Roughing It in the Bush
• Charles Jacobs Peterson – The Cabin and Parlor; or, Slaves and Masters
• George W. M. Reynolds – Mary Price
• Caroline Rush – The North and the South; or, Slavery and Its Contrasts
• William L. G. Smith – Life at the South; or, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" As It Is
• Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom's Cabin
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• *The History of Henry Esmond
• *Men's Wives
• Leo Tolstoy – Childhood
• Catharine Parr Traill – Canadian Crusoes
• Ivan Turgenev – A Sportsman's Sketches
• Susan Bogert Warner – Queechy
• Walt Whitman – Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

  Children

• Ellen Henrietta Ranyard – The Book and its Story

  Drama

• Dion Boucicault – The Corsican Brothers
• Manuel Bretón de los Herreros – La escuela del matrimonio
• Alexandre Dumas, fils – La Dame aux Caméllias
• Gustav Freytag – Die Journalisten
• Christian Friedrich Hebbel – Agnes Bernauer
• Tom Taylor and Charles Reade – Masks and Faces

  Poetry

• Théophile Gautier – Emaux et camées

  Non-fiction

• Juan Bautista Alberdi – Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina
• William Wells Brown – Three Years in Europe
• Kuno Fischer – System der Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre
• Edward A. Freeman – The Preservation and Restoration of Ancient Monuments
• Victor Hugo – Napoléon le Petit
• Karl Marx – The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
• Susanna Moodie – Roughing It in The Bush: or, Forest Life in Canada
• Laurence Oliphant – A Journey to Katmandu, with the camp of Jung Bahadoor
• Dr. Peter Mark Roget – Roget's Thesaurus
• Leopold von Ranke – Französische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert

  Births

• February 24 – George Moore, Irish novelist, memoirist and dramatist
• March 15 – Augusta, Lady Gregory, Irish dramatist and folklorist
• April 23 – Edwin Markham, American poet
• June 4 – Lucas Malet, English novelist
• September 2 – Paul Bourget, French novelist, poet and critic
• October 31 – Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, American short-story and children's writer
• November 8 – Lin Shu, Chinese translator

  Deaths

• February 17 – Micah Joseph Lebensohn, Lithuanian poet writing in Hebrew
• February 25 – Thomas Moore, Irish poet
• March 4 – Nikolai Gogol, Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer
• March 25 – Jane West, English novelist and writer of conduct books
• April 25 – Álvares de Azevedo, Brazilian Ultra-Romantic writer
• May 3 – Sara Coleridge, English author and translator
• May 12 – John Richardson, Canadian novelist
• May 25 – Charlotta Berger, Swedish poet and novelist
• September 11 – Margaret Holford the Younger, English poet and novelist
• September 30 – Mary Matilda Betham, English diarist, scholar and poet
• October 26 – Vincenzo Gioberti, Italian philosopher
• November 28 – Ludger Duvernay, French Canadian journalist and publisher
• December 16 – Samuel Lee, English orientalist and linguist