1895 in literature

Events

• January – The Ottoman illustrated magazine Servet-i Fünun is taken over by Tevfik Fikret, who turns it into a vehicle for Edebiyat-ı Cedide. These writers are committed to conservatism and Ottomanism, rather than Turkish nationalism, but also favor Westernization. They use a "recondite and obscure" Ottoman language within the framework of aestheticism.
• January–May – H. G. Wells' first "scientific romance", the novella The Time Machine, is published serially in The New Review. The first book editions are published by Henry Holt and Company in New York on May 7 and Heinemann in London on May 29.

• January 3 – The première of Oscar Wilde's comedy An Ideal Husband takes place at the Haymarket Theatre in London.
• January 5
• *The première of Henry James's historical drama Guy Domville held at St James's Theatre in London is booed.
• *A. E. Waite ceases to publish and edit his occult periodical The Unknown World.
• January 12 – The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty is registered in England and begins acquiring properties and making them accessible to the public. Carlyle's House in Chelsea is one of the first to open.
• February – The Bookman, a monthly, is first published by Dodd, Mead and Company with Harry Thurston Peck as editor. It publishes the first bestseller list, which is headed by Frank R. Stockton's novel The Adventures of Captain Horn.
• February 14 – Oscar Wilde's last play, the comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, opens at St James's Theatre, London.
• February 18 – The Marquess of Queensberry, leaves a calling card at the Albemarle Club in London inscribed: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite", i. e. sodomite, inducing Wilde to charge him with criminal libel. In a meeting on March 25 at the Café Royal in London, Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw fail to dissuade Wilde from proceeding with the action.
• April/May – Pan, a German arts and literary magazine, is first published, in Berlin.
• April 3–5 – Queensberry is acquitted in the libel case of Wilde v Queensberry at the Old Bailey in London. Evidence of Wilde's homosexual relationships with young men renders him liable to criminal prosecution under the Labouchere Amendment, while the Libel Act 1843 renders him legally liable for the considerable expenses Queensberry has incurred in his defence, leaving Wilde penniless.
• April 6 – Oscar Wilde is arrested at the Cadogan Hotel, London, in the company of Robbie Ross, for "unlawfully committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons". He is detained on remand in Holloway Prison.
• April 29 – Joseph Conrad's novel Almayer's Folly is published in London by T. Fisher Unwin, as Conrad's first published work, after retirement from his career at sea). It marks the first appearance of his pseudonym.
• May 23 – Representatives of the Astor Library and Lenox Library, with the backing of Samuel J. Tilden, agree to merge and form the New York Public Library.
• May 25
• *After a retrial of the criminal case of Regina v. Wilde at the Old Bailey, Oscar Wilde is convicted of gross indecency and taken to Pentonville Prison to begin a two-year sentence of hard labour. In June he requests to read in his cell Pater's The Renaissance, Augustine's Confessions and works by Baudelaire and Newman. On November 21 he is transferred to Reading Gaol.
• *Henry Irving becomes the first English actor to be knighted as such.
• October
• *The American Historical Review appears for the first time.
• *Stephen Crane's American Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage is first published in an abridged book format by D. Appleton & Company in New York.
• *Rudyard Kipling publishes the story "Mowgli Leaves the Jungle Forever" in The Cosmopolitan illustrated magazine in the United States, concluding the series collected in The Second Jungle Book, published in England in November.
• November 1 – Thomas Hardy's last completed novel, Jude the Obscure is published by Osgood, McIlvaine, and Co. in London, dated 1896, on completion of an expurgated serialization under the title Hearts Insurgent in Harper's Magazine. It is strongly criticized on moral grounds. Hardy later claims that Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, burned a copy.
• c. December – Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the future Joseph Stalin, publishes his romantic poems in the newspaper Iveria, receiving accolades from a senior writer, Ilia Chavchavadze.
• December 19 – Robert Frost marries Elinor Miriam White at Lawrence, Massachusetts.

• George du Maurier's novel Trilby, serialized in 1894, is first published in book form. It is also adapted for stage as Trilby, first in the United States. Wilton Lackaye plays Svengali and Virginia Harned the title rôle. It opens in England on September 7 at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, with a London première on October 30 at the Haymarket Theatre), with Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Dorothea Baird. The play is so successful that Tree can use the profits to build Her Majesty's Theatre. It introduces the trilby hat.
• William Poel sets up the Elizabethan Stage Society to promote productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the assumed style of the English Renaissance theatre.
• Abdallah bin Hemedi bin Ali Ajjemy's Habari za Wakilindi is the first novel in the Swahili language.
• Castello Holford's utopian novel Aristopia: A Romance-History of the New World, appears in Boston as the first full-length alternate history in English.
• Ernest Thayer recites Casey at the Bat at a Harvard class reunion, resolving a mystery about the poem's authorship.
• The first edition of the Times Atlas of the World is published at the office of The Times newspaper in London.
• Hall Caine travels in the United States and Canada, representing the U.K. Society of Authors. He obtains international copyright concessions from the Dominion Parliament.

  New books

Fiction

• Grant Allen
• *The British Barbarians
• *The Woman Who Did
• John Kendrick Bangs – A House-Boat on the Styx
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Sons of Fire
• Rhoda Broughton – Scylla or Charybdis?
• Robert W. Chambers – The King in Yellow
• Joseph Conrad – Almayer's Folly
• Marie Corelli – The Sorrows of Satan
• Stephen Crane – The Red Badge of Courage
• Victoria Crosse – The Woman Who Didn't
• Grazia Deledda – Anime oneste
• Ménie Muriel Dowie – Gallia
• Alice Dunbar – Violets and Other Tales
• Isabelle Eberhardt as Nicolas Podolinsky – "Infernalia"
• J. Meade Falkner – The Lost Stradivarius
• Antonio Fogazzaro – The Little World of the Past
• Ludwig Ganghofer – Hubertus Castle
• Hamlin Garland – Rose of Dutcher's Coolly
• George Gissing
• *Eve's Ransom
• *The Paying Guest
• *Sleeping Fires
• Thomas Hardy – Jude the Obscure
• Robert Hichens – An Imaginative Man
• Castello Holford – Aristopia
• William Wilson Hunter – The Old Missionary
• Joris-Karl Huysmans – En Route
• Henry James – Terminations
• Olha Kobylianska – Tsarivna
• John Uri Lloyd – Etidorhpa, or, the end of the earth: the strange history of a mysterious being and the account of a remarkable journey
• George MacDonald – Lilith
• Ian Maclaren – The Days of Auld Lang Syne
• George Meredith – The Amazing Marriage
• Dmitry Merezhkovsky – The Death of the Gods
• Kálmán Mikszáth – St. Peter's Umbrella
• Arthur Morrison – Chronicles of Martin Hewitt
• Gustavus W. Pope – Journey to Venus
• Bolesław Prus – Pharaoh
• Emilio Salgari – I misteri della jungla nera
• Henryk Sienkiewicz – Quo Vadis
• Leo Tolstoy – Master and Man
• Jules Verne – Propeller Island
• H. G. Wells – The Time Machine

  Children and young people

• Lewis Carroll – Sylvie and Bruno
• G. E. Farrow – The Wallypug of Why
• Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler – The Young Pretenders
• Rudyard Kipling
• *The Brushwood Boy
• *The Second Jungle Book
• L. T. Meade – A Princess of the Gutter
• Mary Louisa Molesworth – The Carved Lions
• Emilio Salgari – I Misteri della Jungla Nera
• Florence Kate Upton – The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg
• Alice Zimmern – Greek History for Young Readers''

  Drama

• Tristan Bernard – Les Pieds nickelés
• Joaquín Dicenta – Juan José
• José Echegaray – El estigma
• Hulda Garborg – Mødre
• Alfred Jarry – Caesar Antichrist
• Maurice Maeterlinck – Interior
• Jules Renard – La Demande
• Arthur Schnitzler – :de:Liebelei|Liebelei
• Tsubouchi Shōyō – Kiri Hitoha
• Frank Wedekind – Earth Spirit
• Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest
• Hall Caine – The Manxman

  Poetry

• Pauline Johnson – The White Wampum
• Giovanni Marradi – Ballati moderne
• Banjo Paterson – The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses
• See also 1895 in poetry

  Non-fiction

• Lord Acton – A Lecture on the Study of History
• Francis Darwin – The Elements of Botany
• Annetta Seabury Dresser – The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby
• Gustave Le Bon –
• Friedrich Nietzsche – Der Antichrist

  Births

• February 14 – Max Horkheimer, German philosopher
• February 28 – Marcel Pagnol, French novelist
• March 29 – Ernst Jünger, German novelist
• April 17 – Ion Vinea, Romanian poet and novelist
• April 20 – Henry de Montherlant, French novelist and dramatist
• April 23 – Ngaio Marsh, New Zealand detective fiction writer and theatre director
• May 3 – Ernst Kantorowicz, German historian
• May 8 – Edmund Wilson, American literary critic
• May 9 – Lucian Blaga, Romanian poet and philosopher
• May 19 – Charles Sorley, Scottish-born poet
• May 24 – Marcel Janco, Romanian–Israeli artist, art theorist, essayist and poet
• June 16 – Warren Lewis, Irish-born historian
• July 14 – F. R. Leavis, English literary critic
• July 24 – Robert Graves, English poet and novelist
• August 19 – Arnolt Bronnen, Austrian playwright and director
• September 21 – Sergei Yesenin, Russian poet
• October 3 – Giovanni Comisso, Italian writer
• October 17 – C. H. B. Kitchin, English novelist
• October 20 – Alexandru Rosetti, Romanian linguist, editor and memoirist
• October 31 – B. H. Liddell Hart, English military historian
• November 1 – David Jones, Anglo-Welsh poet and artist
• November 16 – Michael Arlen, Armenian novelist and short story writer
• December 1 – Henry Williamson, English novelist
• December 9 – Vivian de Sola Pinto, English poet, literary critic, and historian
• December 14 – Paul Éluard, French poet
• December 24 – Noel Streatfeild, English novelist and children's writer

  Deaths

• January 13 – John Robert Seeley, English historian and essayist
• January 15 – Lady Charlotte Guest, English translator of Welsh literature
• February 16 – Camilla Dufour Crosland, English writer and poet
• February 19 – Auguste Vacquerie, French journalist
• February 20 – Frederick Douglass, African-American abolitionist, orator and writer
• March 5 – Nikolai Leskov, Russian journalist, novelist and short story writer
• March 15 – Cesare Cantù, Italian historian
• March 22 – Henry Coppée, American historian and biographer
• April 3 – Gustav Freytag, German novelist and dramatist
• April 17 – Jorge Isaacs, Colombian writer, politician and explorer
• April 26 – Eric Stenbock, German poet
• May 4 – Lillian Spender, English novelist
• May 26 – Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, Ottoman historian and legal writer
• August 1 – Heinrich von Sybel, German historian
• August 5 – Friedrich Engels, German socialist writer
• November 4 – Eugene Field, American children's author
• November 27 – Alexandre Dumas, fils, French novelist and dramatist
• November 28 – L. S. Bevington, English anarchist poet and essayist

• William Grainge, English local historian