1856 in literature

Events

• January 1 – M. H. Gill, printer to Dublin University, purchases the publishing and bookselling business of James McGlashan, renaming it McGlashan & Gill, the predecessor of Gill & Macmillan.
• March – Charles Dickens buys Gads Hill Place in Kent from the fellow novelist Eliza Lynn.
• March 1 – Lewis Carroll chooses his pseudonym; on May 1 he takes up photography as a hobby.
• March 5 – The second Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, is destroyed by fire, as the first was in 1808.
• May – John Ruskin praises Henry Wallis's painting of The Death of Chatterton when it is exhibited in London; the young poet and novelist George Meredith modelled for the painting.
• July 19–26 – Wilkie Collins' "Anne Rodway", a story in diary form about a needlewoman and her fiancé investigating the murder of a friend, appears in Household Words, as the first English story to feature a woman as the main detective character.
• September 13 – Richard Francis Burton, while serves in the British Army in the Crimean War and engaged to Isabel Arundel, receives permission to set off on an expedition to the African Great Lakes.
• September 29 – English actor Henry Irving makes his stage début at Sunderland as Gaston, Duke of Orleans, in Bulwer Lytton's play Richelieu.
• October – Marian Evans, who has yet to adopt the pseudonym George Eliot, publishes an anonymous article, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists", in the Westminster Review.
• October 1 – December 15 – Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is serialized in Revue de Paris.
• November 6 – The first of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life and her first work of fiction, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton", is submitted to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine by G. H. Lewes for anonymous publication.
• November 18 – English-born actress Laura Keene opens her own theatre in New York City.
• November 20 – Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville meet when Hawthorne is United States consul in Liverpool.
• unknown dates
• *Mikhail Katkov revives the title The Russian Messenger for an influential literary magazine published in Moscow. In its first year he publishes Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's Provincial Sketches and the text of Alexander Ostrovsky's play V chuzhom miru pohmelye.
• *Arthur Schopenhauer adds a chapter on "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love" to the third edition of his The World as Will and Representation.
• *Poet Juris Alunāns' Songs becomes the first significant published literary work in Latvian.
• *The English bookseller W. H. Smith first publishes the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship.
• *Alphonse Daudet begins his teaching career.

  New books

Fiction

• Anonymous – Tit for Tat
• José de Alencar – Cinco minutos
• Fredrika Bremer – Hertha
• William M. Burwell – White Acre vs. Black Acre
• Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. – The Gunmaker of Moscow; or, Vladimir, the Monk
• Wilkie Collins – The Dead Secret
• Mrs. Craik – John Halifax, Gentleman
• Charles Dickens and others – The Wreck of the Golden Mary
• Caroline Lee Hentz – Ernest Linwood
• Geraldine Jewsbury – The Sorrows of Gentility
• Gottfried Keller – Die Leute von Seldwyla
• Herman Melville
• *The Piazza Tales
• *I and My Chimney
• Eduard Mörike – Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag
• Charles Reade – It Is Never Too Late to Mend
• George Sand
• *Lucrezia Floriani
• *La Mare au diable
• Harriet Beecher Stowe –
• Leo Tolstoy – Youth
• Ivan Turgenev – Rudin
• Charlotte Mary Yonge – The Daisy Chain
• Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary

  Children and young people

• R. M. Ballantyne -The Young Fur-Traders
• Frances Browne – Granny's Wonderful Chair

  Drama

• Sava Dobroplodni – Mihal the Mouse-Eater
• Colin Henry Hazlewood – Jessie Vere, or the Return of the Wanderer
• Henrik Ibsen – Olaf Liljekrans
• Gustav Räder – Robert and Bertram

  Poetry

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Aurora Leigh
• Victor Hugo – Les Contemplations
• See also 1856 in poetry

  Non-fiction

• Alphonse Louis Constant - Rituel de la haute magie
• Lord Dufferin – Letters From High Latitudes
• Alexander Kinloch Forbes – Rasmala
• J. A. Froude – History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth
• Washington Irving – The Life of George Washington, Volume 3
• Hermann Lotze – Mikrokosmos
• Henry Morley – Cornelius Agrippa: The Life of Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Doctor and Knight, Commonly known as a Magician
• John Lothrop Motley – The Rise of the Dutch Republic
• Frederick Law Olmsted – A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; With Remarks on Their Economy
• William Ridley – gurre kamilaroi
• Alexis de Tocqueville – L'Ancien Régime et la révolution

  Births

• January 9 – Lizette Woodworth Reese, American poet
• January 13 – Henrietta Stannard, English novelist
• February 14 – Frank Harris, Irish-born American journalist and memoirist
• April 5 – Booker T. Washington, African-American educator, author and orator
• May 15 – L. Frank Baum, American children's writer, novelist and poet
• June 28 – Constantin Dobrescu-Argeș, Romanian journalist, playwright, and peasant activist
• June 29 – Maria Cederschiöld, Swedish journalist and suffragette
• July 25 – Charles Major, American novelist and lawyer
• July 26 – George Bernard Shaw, Irish dramatist and critic
• August 8 – Thomas Anstey Guthrie, English comic novelist and journalist
• August 20 – Jakub Bart-Ćišinski, Upper Sorbian poet, writer, playwright and translator
• August 27 – Ivan Franko, Ukrainian writer, translator and political activist
• September 28 – Kate Douglas Wiggin, American children's writer and educator
• October 17 – Jane Barlow, Irish novelist and poet
• November 17 – Evelyn Everett-Green, English novelist and children's writer
• December 21 – Tomas O'Crohan, Irish Gaelic writer and fisherman
• unknown date – Anne Elliot, English novelist

  Deaths

• January – James Baillie Fraser, Scottish travel writer
• February 17 – Heinrich Heine, German poet
• April 26 – Pyotr Chaadaev, Russian philosopher
• June 11 – Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, German philologist
• June 26 – Max Stirner, German philosopher
• June 27 – Joseph Meyer, German publisher and encyclopedist
• July 11 – Josef Kajetán Tyl, Czech dramatist and author of national anthem
• July 21 – Emil Aarestrup, Danish poet
• July 29 – Karel Havlíček Borovský, Czech poet, critic and publisher
• August 24 – William Buckland, English theologian and antiquary
• August 30 – Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, English humorist
• October 13 – Robert Christie, Canadian historian and journalist
• November 10 – Johann Kaspar Zeuss, German historian and philologist

  Awards

• Newdigate Prize – William Powell James