1862 in literature

• February – Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети – old spelling Отцы и дѣти, {{Transliteration|ru|Ottsy i dety}}, literally "Fathers and Children") is published by Russkiy Vestnik in Moscow.
• March 30 or 31 – The first two volumes of Victor Hugo's epic historical novel Les Misérables appear in Brussels, followed on April 3 by Paris publication, with the remaining volumes on May 15. The first English-language translations, by Charles Edwin Wilbour, are published in New York on June 7, and by Frederic Charles Lascelles Wraxall, in London in October.
• April 6 – Two months after joining the staff of General William Babcock Hazen, Ambrose Bierce joins in the Battle of Shiloh, later the subject of a memoir.{{Cite journal |last=Cozzens |first=Peter |date=April 1996 |title=The Tormenting Flame: What Ambrose Bierce Saw in a Fire-Swept Thicket at Shiloh Haunted Him for the rest of his Life |journal=Civil War Times Illustrated |volume=XXXV |issue=1 |pages=44–54}} Among those on the opposite side is the future journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who will also record his experiences.{{Cite book |title=Shiloh 1862 – the death of innocence |last=Arnold |first=James |year=1998 |location=London |publisher=Osprey Publishing |isbn=978-1-85532-606-4 |page=32}}
• April 28 – Thomas Hardy becomes an assistant to architect Arthur Blomfield.{{Cite book |first=F. B. |last=Pinion |title=Thomas Hardy: His Life and Friends |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=BBqxCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA59 |date=1994-06-07 |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan UK |isbn=978-1-349-13594-3 |pages=59–}}
• June – Nikolai Chernyshevsky is imprisoned in Saint Petersburg and begins his novel What Is To Be Done?{{Cite web |first=John |last=Simpkin |url=http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSchernyshevsky.htm |publisher=Spartacus Educational |title=Nikolai Chernyshevsky |date=1997–2013 |accessdate=2014-03-04 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140106040741/http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSchernyshevsky.htm |archive-date=2014-01-06 |url-status=dead}}
• June 4 – Henry Morton Stanley, now a "Galvanized Yankee", joins the Union Army; he is discharged 18 days later because of illness.{{Cite book |last=Gallop |first=Alan |year=2004 |title=Mr Stanley, I presume – the life and explorations of Henry Morton Stanley |location=Stroud |publisher=Sutton |isbn=978-0750930932 |page=61}}
• July – George Eliot's historical novel Romola begins serialization in Cornhill Magazine, the first time she has published a full-length book in this format. George Murray Smith of the publishers Smith, Elder & Co. has agreed a £7,000 advance for it.{{Cite book |last=Spittles |first=Brian |title=George Eliot: Godless Woman |location=Basingstoke; London |publisher=Macmillan Press|year=1993 |isbn=0-333-57218-1}}
• July 1 – Moscow's first free public library opens as The Library of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumiantsev Museum, predecessor of the Russian State Library.
• July 4 – Charles Dodgson (better known as by his later pseudonym Lewis Carroll) extemporises a story for 10-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters on a rowing trip on The Isis from Oxford to Godstow. The story becomes a manuscript titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground and is published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.{{Cite journal |first=Richard |last=Cavendish |title=The Alice in Wonderland story first told |journal=History Today |volume=62 |issue=7 |url=http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/alice-wonderland-story-first-told |date=July 2012 |accessdate=2016-05-01}}

File:Rossetti-golden head.jpg's Goblin Market and Other Poems, by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti]]

• September 23 – Leo Tolstoy marries Sophia (Sonya) Andreevna Behrs, 16 years his junior, in Moscow, having given her a diary detailing his previous sexual relations.
• November 26 – Charles Dodgson sends the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground to Alice Liddell.{{Cite book |first=Mark J. |last=Davies |title=Alice in Waterland: Lewis Carroll and the River Thames in Oxford |location=Oxford |publisher=Signal Books |year=2010 |isbn=978-1904955726}}
• November 29 – Serialization of The Notting Hill Mystery by "Charles Felix" (probably Charles Warren Adams) commences in Once A Week (London), with illustrations by George du Maurier; it is seen as the first full-length detective novel in English.{{Cite news |first=Paul |last=Collins |title=Before Hercule or Sherlock, There Was Ralph |work=The New York Times Book Review |date=2011-01-07}}{{Cite book |first=Julian |last=Symons |authorlink=Julian Symons |title=Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel |location=London |publisher=Faber and Faber |year=1972 |isbn=978-0-571-09465-3 |quote=There is no doubt that the first detective novel, preceding Collins and Gaboriau, was The Notting Hill Mystery. |page=51}}
• December – Louisa May Alcott becomes a nurse at the Union hospital in Georgetown
• December 24 – William Dean Howells marries Elinor Mead at the American Embassy in Paris.

Uncertain dates

• James Russell Lowell begins writing for The North American Review.
• Karl Heinrich Ulrichs begins writing about homosexuality under the pseudonym of "Numa Numantius".

• José de Alencar – Lucíola
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Lady Audley's Secret
• Camilo Castelo Branco – Amor de Perdição
• Wilkie Collins – No Name
• Fyodor Dostoevsky – The House of the Dead (Записки из Мёртвого дома, Zapiski iz Myortvogo doma, book publication)
• George Eliot – Romola (serialization)
• Gustave Flaubert – Salammbo
• Eugène Fromentin – Dominique
• The Goncourt brothers (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt) – Sister Philomene (Sœur Philomène)
• Victor Hugo – Les Misérables
• Henry Kingsley – Ravenshoe
• George MacDonald – David Elginbrod
• Watts Phillips – The Honour of the Family
• Fritz Reuter – From My Farming Days
• John Skelton – Thalatta, or the Great Commoner
• Elizabeth Drew Stoddard – The Morgesons
• William Makepeace Thackeray – The Adventures of Philip
• Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy – Prince Serebrenni (Князь Серебряный)
• Anthony Trollope – Orley Farm (publication completed)
• Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons
• Mrs. Henry Wood – The Channings

• Frances Freeling Broderip – Tale of the Toys, Told by Themselves
• Catherine Crowe – The Adventures of a Monkey
• F. W. Farrar – St. Winifred's or The World of School
• Henrietta Keddie (as Sarah Tytler) – Papers for Thoughtful Girls, with illustrative sketches of some girls' lives
• Charlotte Yonge
• Countess Kate
• The Stokesley Secret

• Émile Augier – Le Fils de Giboyer
• María Bibiana Benítez – La Cruz del Morro (The Cross of El Morro)
• Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson – Sigurd Slembe (Sigurd the Bastard, trilogy, published)
• Henrik Ibsen – Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie, first published)
• Watts Phillips – His Last Victory
• Edmund Yates – Invitations

• Pavlo Chubynsky – "Shche ne vmerla Ukraina" (Ukraine's glory has not perished, later the text of the Ukrainian national anthem)
• Henrik Ibsen – Terje Vigen
• George Meredith – Modern Love
• Christina Rossetti – Goblin Market and other poems

• John Hill Burton – The Book-Hunter
• Thomas De Quincey – Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets
• John William Draper – The History of the Intellectual Development of Europe
• Theodor Fontane – Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, volume 1, Die Grafschaft Ruppin
• Julia Kavanagh
• English Women of Letters
• French Women of Letters
• George Perkins Marsh – The Origin and History of the English Language
• John Ruskin – Unto This Last
• Elizabeth Missing Sewell – Impressions of Rome, Florence, and Turin
• John Skelton – Nugæ Criticæ
• Samuel Smiles – Lives of the Engineers (5 volumes)
• Leo Tolstoy – "The School at Yasnaya Polyana"

• January 24 – Edith Wharton, American novelist (died 1937){{cite book|title=Dictionary of World Biography.|publisher=Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers|year=1999|page=3953|isbn=9781579580483}}
• February 17 – Mori Ōgai (森 鷗外), Japanese army surgeon, poet, translator and realist fiction writer (died 1922)
• April 11 – Lurana W. Sheldon, American author and newspaper editor (died 1945){{citation needed|date=October 2022}}
• May 1 – Marcel Prévost, French dramatist (died 1941)
• May 9 – Hugh Stowell Scott (Henry Seton Merriman), English novelist (died 1903)
• May 15 – Arthur Schnitzler, Austrian dramatist and novelist (died 1931)
• June 6 – Henry Newbolt, English poet (died 1938)
• June 18 – Carolyn Wells, American novelist and poet (died 1942){{Cite web |title=Carolyn Wells {{!}} American writer |url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carolyn-Wells |website=Encyclopedia Britannica |accessdate=22 January 2020 |language=en}}
• July 16 – Ida B. Wells, American journalist and novelist (died 1931){{cite web |url=http://faculty.webster.edu/woolflm/idabwells.html |title=Ida B. Wells: Crusade for Justice |last=McBride |first=Jennifer |date=1998 |publisher=Webster University |type=online |access-date=January 30, 2013 }}
• August 1 – Montague Rhodes James, English scholar and short story writer (died 1936)
• August 2 – Paul Bujor, Romanian politician, zoologist and short story writer (died 1952)
• August 6 – Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, English historian (died 1932)P. D. Proctor, (1949), pages 225–227 in "The Dictionary of National Biography 1931–1940", edited by L. G. Wickham Legg, London: Oxford University Press, 968 pages (hardcover)
• August 21 – Emilio Salgari, Italian adventure novelist (died 1911){{cite book|author=Paola Irene Galli Mastrodonato|title=Emilio Salgari: The Tiger Is Still Alive!|publisher=University Press Copublishing Division|year=2024|isbn=9781683934097|page=2}}
• August 29 – Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian poet and playwright (died 1949)Bettina Knapp, Maurice Maeterlinck, Boston: Thackery Publishers, 1975, p. 18.
• September 2 – Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉 覚三), Japanese writer on the arts (died 1913)
• September 27 – Francis Adams, Anglo-Australian poet, novelist and dramatist (died 1893)
• October 13 – Mary Kingsley, English travel writer (died 1900){{cite ODNB|title=Kingsley, Mary Henrietta|id=15620|first=D. J.|last= Birkett|date=3 January 2008}}
• November 15 – Gerhart Hauptmann, German dramatist, novelist and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (died 1946)
• December 8 – Georges Feydeau, French farceur (died 1921)
• December 16 – John Fox, Jr., American novelist and journalist (died 1919)
• December 23 – Henri Pirenne, Belgian historian (died 1935)
• date unknown — Jessie King, Scottish essayist, poet, journalist (year of death unknown)

• January 11 – Jean Philibert Damiron, French philosopher (born 1794)
• February 24 – Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Danish novelist and poet (born 1789)
• February 27 (February 16 O.S.) – Constantin Sion, Moldavian polemicist, genealogist and literary forger (born 1795)
• April 6 – Fitz James O'Brien, Irish-American science fiction pioneer (born 1828)
• May 6 – Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher (born 1817)
• May 25 – Johann Nestroy, Austrian dramatist (born 1801)
• August 27 – Thomas Jefferson Hogg, English biographer (born 1792)
• November 26 – Julia Pardoe, English novelist and historian (born 1806)
• November 30 – James Sheridan Knowles, Irish dramatist and actor (born 1784)
• December 17 – Katherine Thomson, writing as Grace Wharton, English novelist and historian (born 1797){{Cite book |title=Appletons' annual cyclopaedia and register of important events of the year: 1862 |year=1863 |publisher=D. Appleton & Company |location=New York |page=694 |url=https://archive.org/stream/1862appletonsan02newyuoft#page/n701/mode/1up}}

• Gaisford Prize – Robert William Raper (Trinity) for comic iambic verse: Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II, Act 4, Sc. 3Raper, Robert W. (1862). [https://books.google.com/books?id=iAYJAAAAQAAJ Gaisford Prize: Greek Iambics Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, July 2, MDCCCLXII] Oxford: T. and G. Shrimpton, online at books.google.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-08-14.
• Newdigate Prize – Arthur C. Auchmuty, "Julian the Apostate"

{{reflist|30em}}

{{Year in literature article categories}}