1858 in literature

Events

• January 3 – The English critic John Ruskin first meets at her London home 10-year-old Rose La Touche, who becomes his muse.
• April 29 – Charles Dickens embarks on his first professional tour giving readings from his works. This will involve 129 appearances in 49 towns throughout the British Isles.
• May 15 – The third Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, designed by Edward Middleton Barry, opens, having been rebuilt after its second destruction by fire in 1856.
• June 18 – Henrik Ibsen marries Suzannah Thoresen, in the same year that he becomes creative director of Oslo's National Theater.
• September – Charles Baudelaire's study on Théophile Gautier is published in Revue contemporaine.
• October 15 – The farce Our American Cousin by the English playwright Tom Taylor is first performed at Laura Keene's Theatre in New York City, with the American Joe Jefferson in the title rôle and the English actor Edward Askew Sothern as Lord Dundreary.

• Khachatur Abovian's historical novel Wounds of Armenia: Lamentation of a Patriot, written in the Yerevan dialect in 1841, appears in Tiflis a decade after the author's presumed death; it is seen as the first Armenian novel and the first modern Eastern Armenian literary work.

  New books

Fiction

• William Harrison Ainsworth – The Life and Adventures of Mervyn Clitheroe
• Élie Berthet – La Bête du Gévaudan
• Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson – Arne
• Robert Barnabas Brough – The Life of Sir John Falstaff
• George Eliot – Scenes of Clerical Life
• Octave Feuillet – Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre
• Paul Féval – Le Bossu
• Ernest-Aimé Feydeau – Fanny
• Elizabeth Gaskell – My Lady Ludlow
• Ivan Goncharov – Frigate "Pallada"
• Catherine Gore – Heckington
• Bernardo Guimarães – Inspirações da Tarde
• Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville – Robert Emuret
• George MacDonald – Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
• Abraham Mapu – Ayit Tzavua
• Aleksey Pisemsky
• *Boyarschina
• *One Thousand Souls
• Thomas Mayne Reid – Oceola
• John Hovey Robinson – Nick Whiffles or The Trapper Guide. A Tale of the North West
• Catharine Maria Sedgwick – Memoir of Joseph Curtis
• Anthony Trollope – Doctor Thorne

  Children and young people

• R. M. Ballantyne
• *The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean
• *The Gorilla Hunters
• Frederic Farrar – Eric, or, Little by Little
• Annie Keary – The Rival Kings
• Countess of Ségur – Sophie's Misfortunes
• Charlotte Mary Yonge – The Christmas Mummers and other stories

  Drama

• Thomas Holley Chivers – The Sons of Usna: a Tragic Apotheosis in Five Acts
• John Oxenford – Porter's Knot
• Tom Taylor – Our American Cousin

  Poetry

• Matthew Arnold – Merope
• Alphonse Daudet – Les Amoureuses
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – The Courtship of Miles Standish
• William Morris – The Defence of Guinevere, and other Poems

  Non-fiction

• John Brown – Horas Subsecivae
• Gray's Anatomy, 1st edition
• William Carew Hazlitt – The History of the Origin and Rise of the Republic of Venice
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. – The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
• William H. Prescott – History of Philip II, volume 3
• Charles Piazzi Smyth – Teneriffe: An Astronomer's Experiment
• Alfred Russel Wallace – On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type

  Births

• January 22 – Beatrice Webb, English political writer
• January 24 – Constance Naden, English poet and philosopher
• March 12 – Adolph Ochs, American newspaper publisher
• April 1 – Gaetano Mosca, Italian political scientist and public servant
• April 15 – Émile Durkheim, French sociologist
• June 20 – Charles W. Chesnutt, American writer
• June 25 – Georges Courteline, French dramatist and novelist
• July 24 – Wolfgang Kapp, Prussian journalist
• August 2 – William Watson, English poet
• August 3 – Paul Sabatier, French religious writer
• August 15 – E. Nesbit, English children's author
• November 20 – Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish writer
• December 26 – Owen Morgan Edwards, Welsh historian and educator

  Deaths

• February 13 – Hermann Heinrich Gossen, German economist
• February 26 – Thomas Tooke, English economist
• April 22 – Robert Stephen Rintoul, Scottish journalist
• May 3 – Auguste Brizeux, French poet
• May 12 – Georg Benedikt Winer, German theologian
• May 17 – Frank Forester, English novelist and sports writer
• June 3 – Edward Moxon, English poet and publisher
• June 28 – Jane Marcet, English writer of introductory science books
• November 3 – Harriet Taylor Mill, English philosopher
• November 15 – Johanna Kinkel, German writer and composer
• December 18 – Thomas Holley Chivers, American poet and physician