1864 in literature

Events

• January – Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, the first of his Palliser novels, begins to appear in monthly parts in London. Trollope completes it on April 28 and the first volume is published as a book in September by Chapman & Hall. In April, The Small House at Allington concludes publication in the Cornhill Magazine and is published in book form by George Smith.
• January 2–April 16 – James Payn publishes his most popular story, Lost Sir Massingberd, in Chambers's Journal. He follows it in the magazine by Married Beneath Him.
• February 20 – Painter George Frederic Watts marries his 16-year-old model, the actress Ellen Terry, 30 years his junior, in London. She elopes less than a year later.
• March – The first issue of the Russian literary magazine Epoch, edited by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his brother Mikhail, is published in Saint Petersburg. This and the March and April issues contain the first publication of Fyodor's existential novella Notes from Underground.
• April 10 – Publisher William Ticknor dies of pneumonia in Philadelphia while on a trip with Nathaniel Hawthorne for the sake of the latter's health.
• April 23 – The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft is founded as the first scientific and cultural association of its type in Weimar, and one of the world's oldest continuing literary societies.
• April – Charles Baudelaire leaves Paris for Belgium in the hope of resolving his financial difficulties.
• May 26 – Alexandre Dumas, fils marries Nadejda Naryschkine. His father, Alexandre Dumas, père, returns to Paris from Italy.
• May – The first Lithuanian press ban is imposed in the Russian Empire.
• June 19 – Henrik Ibsen arrives in Rome in a self-imposed exile from Norway that will last for 27 years.
• June 27 – Ambrose Bierce is wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.
• July 2 – The Female Detective is published under the pseudonym "Andrew Forrester, Junior" in London, presenting the first female professional detective in fiction. Around December, she is followed by Mrs Paschal in Revelations of a Lady Detective, published anonymously by William Stephens Hayward.
• September – A debate at the Royal Geographical Society between Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke is prevented by Speke's suicide.
• November 10 – The poet and critic John Addington Symonds the younger marries Janet Catherine North.
• November 25 – The brothers Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth and Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. make their only appearance onstage together, in a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City, staged to raise funds for a memorial to William Shakespeare in the city's Central Park.
• December – Sheridan Le Fanu's Gothic locked room mystery-thriller Uncle Silas completes its serialization in his Dublin University Magazine as "Maud Ruthyn and Uncle Silas" and is published as a three-volume novel by Richard Bentley in London.

• The former English chess master Howard Staunton publishes a facsimile of the 1600 quarto text of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, the first use of photolithography for such a book.

  New books

Fiction

• José de Alencar – Diva
• Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly – Chevalier Destouches
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Henry Dunbar: the Story of an Outcast
• Anne Moncure Crane – Emily Chester
• Charles Dickens – Our Mutual Friend
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – Notes from Underground
• Alexandre Dumas – La Sanfelice
• Georg Ebers – Eine ägyptische Königstochter
• Amelia Edwards – Barbara's History
• George Eliot – "Brother Jacob"
• Elizabeth Gaskell – Wives and Daughters
• The Goncourt brothers – Renée Mauperin
• Sheridan Le Fanu
• *Uncle Silas
• *Wylder's Hand
• Nikolai Leskov – No Way Out
• George MacDonald – The Light Princess
• Charlotte Riddell – George Geith of Fen Court
• Anthony Trollope
• *The Small House at Allington
• *Can You Forgive Her?

  Children and young people

• R. D. Blackmore – Clara Vaughan
• Rebecca Sophia Clarke – Little Prudy
• Jules Verne – A Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Charlotte Mary Yonge – A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands

  Drama

• Matthías Jochumsson – Útilegumennirnir
• Aleksis Kivi
• *:fi:Kullervo |Kullervo
• *:fi:Nummisuutarit|Nummisuutarit
• Thomas William Robertson – David Garrick

  Poetry

• Robert Browning – Dramatis Personae
• Alfred Tennyson – Enoch Arden
• Alfred de Vigny – Les Destinées

  Non-fiction

• Augusta Theodosia Drane – History of England for Family Use
• Edward Eastwick – The Journal of a Diplomate's Three Years' Residence in Persia
• George Perkins Marsh – Man and Nature
• Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux – Les Hauts Phénomènes de la magie
• John Henry Newman – Apologia Pro Vita Sua
• John Ruskin – Cestus of Aglaia
• Henry David Thoreau – The Maine Woods
• Noah Webster, revised by Carl August Friedrich Mahn and edited by Noah Porter – A Dictionary of the English Language, "unabridged" edition

  Births

• January 24 – Marguerite Durand, French actress, journalist and feminist leader
• February 14 – Israel Zangwill, English novelist, playwright and Zionist
• February 21 – Leonard Merrick, English novelist
• February 26 – Antonín Sova, Czech poet and librarian
• April 8 – J. Smeaton Chase, English-born American author and photographer
• April 21 – Max Weber, German sociologist
• May 11 – Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole, Anglo-Irish novelist and composer
• July 20 – Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Nobel Prize-winning Swedish writer
• September 22 – Lodewijk van Deyssel, Dutch novelist
• September 28 – Barry Pain, English poet and fiction writer
• September 29 – Miguel de Unamuno, Basque Spanish writer
• October 14 – Stefan Żeromski, Polish novelist, poet and dramatist
• November 11
• *Alfred Hermann Fried, Austrian Jewish pacifist writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner
• *Maurice Leblanc, French novelist and crime writer
• November 26 – Herman Gorter, Dutch poet and socialist
• November 28 – James Allen, English self-help writer and poet
• December 12 – Paul Elmer More, American critic and essayist

  Deaths

• January 16 – Anton Felix Schindler, Austrian biographer of Beethoven
• January 29
• * Lucy Aikin, English historian
• * Julia Maitland, English writer on India and children's writer
• February 2 – Adelaide Anne Procter, English poet
• March 16 – Robert Smith Surtees, English novelist and sporting writer
• May 19 – Nathaniel Hawthorne, American novelist
• May 20 – John Clare, English poet
• May 26 – Charles Sealsfield, Austro-American novelist and journalist
• July 4 – Thomas Colley Grattan, Irish miscellanist and novelist
• August 6 – Catherine Sinclair, Scottish novelist and children's writer
• August 7 – Janez Puhar, Slovene poet
• September 17 – Walter Savage Landor, English writer and poet
• November 3 – Gonçalves Dias, Brazilian poet and playwright
• December 6 – Simonas Daukantas, Lithuanian ethnographer and historian

  Awards

• Newdigate Prize – William John Courthope