1802 in literature

Events

• April 15 – William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth walk by Ullswater and see a belt of daffodils, which inspires his poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", written two years later.
• April 19 – Joseph Grimaldi first presents his white-faced clown character "Joey", at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London.
• Summer – Adam Oehlenschläger writes at one sitting the poem "Guldhornene", introducing Romanticism into Danish poetry.
• July 31 – William Wordsworth, leaving London for Dover and Calais with Dorothy, witnesses an early morning scene he captures in a Petrarchan sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge". In Calais, he will meet his 9-year-old illegitimate daughter Caroline for the first time.
• October 4 – William Wordsworth marries Mary Hutchinson at Brompton, Scarborough.
• October 10 – The Edinburgh Review, a reforming quarterly, is first published.
• November 13 – The first play in English explicitly called a melodrama ("mélodrame") is performed in London: Thomas Holcroft's Gothic A Tale of Mystery (an unacknowledged translation of de Pixerécourt's Cœlina, ou, l'enfant du mystère), at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.
• November 15 – Washington Irving makes a first appearance in print at the age of nineteen, with observational letters to the New York Morning Chronicle under the name Jonathan Oldstyle.
• December 2–3 – Jane Austen accepts, then rejects, a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither at his Hampshire home.
• unknown dates
  • Henry Boyd completes the first full English translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.
  • Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron's Latin translation of Oupneck'hat is published, the first published translation of the Upanishads into a Western language.
  • The first part of Jippensha Ikku's picaresque novel Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige (東海道中膝栗毛, Shank's Mare) is published in Japan.

New books

Fiction

• François-René de Chateaubriand – René
• Elizabeth Craven – The Soldiers of Dierenstein
• John Gilchrist – Hindee Story Teller
• Elizabeth Gunning – The Farmer's Boy
• Jane Harvey – Warkfield Castle
• Rachel Hunter – The History of the Grubthorpe Family
• Isabella Kelly – The Baron's Daughter
• Francis Lathom – Astonishment
• Mary Meeke
  • Independence
  • Midnight Weddings
• Mary Pilkington – The Accusing Spirit
• Anne Louise Germaine de Stael – Delphine
• Jane West – The Infidel Father

Drama

• Mary Berry – Fashionable Friends
• James Boaden – The Voice of Nature
• Charles-Guillaume Étienne – Les Deux Mères
• Thomas Morton – Beggar My Neighbour
• Heinrich Joseph von Collin – Coriolan
• Frederick Reynolds – Delays and Blunders
• Lumley Skeffington – The Word of Honour

Poetry

• Walter Scott, ed. – Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

Non-fiction

• Saul Ascher – Ideen zur natürlichen Geschichte der politischen Revolutionen (Ideas toward a Natural History of Political Revolutions)
• Jeremy Bentham – Civil War and Penal Legislation
• Jacob Boehme – Les Trois Principes de l'Essence Divine (translated into French by Louis Claude de Saint-Martin)
• François-René de Chateaubriand – Génie du christianisme (The Genius of Christianity)
• John Debrett – Debrett's Peerage (first edition)
• John Home – History of the Rebellion of 1745
• Malcolm Laing – History of Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdoms
• Louis Claude de Saint-Martin – Le Ministère de l'homme-esprit
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling – Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge (Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things)
• Joanna Southcott – The Strange Effects of Faith; with Remarkable Prophecies (with fifth and final part)
• Noah Webster – The Rights of Neutral Nations in Time of War

Births

• January 9 – Catharine Parr Traill, English-Canadian memoirist and children's author (died 1899)
• February 11 – Lydia Maria Child, American abolitionist, activist, novelist, and journalist (died 1880)
• February 26 – Victor Hugo, French novelist and poet (died 1885)
• June 2 – Karl Lehrs, German classicist (died 1878)
• June 12 – Harriet Martineau, English social theorist (died 1876)
• July 10 – Robert Chambers, Scottish writer and publisher (died 1871)
• July 24 – Alexandre Dumas, père, French novelist (died 1870)
• July 28 – Winthrop Mackworth Praed, English poet (died 1839)
• August 14 - Letitia Elizabeth Landon, English poet and novelist (died 1838)
• August 25 – Nikolaus Lenau, Hungarian-born German poet (died 1850)
• November 29 – Wilhelm Hauff, German poet and novelist (died 1827)
• December 8 – Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet (died 1839)
• December 23 – Sara Coleridge, English poet and translator (died 1852)
• December 31 – Richard Henry Horne, English poet, critic and journalist, and public official in Australia (died 1884)

Deaths

• February 26 – Alexander Geddes, Scottish theologian, scholar and priest (born 1737)
• April 18 – Erasmus Darwin, English poet and natural philosopher (born 1731)
• June 5 – Johann Christian Gottlieb Ernesti, German classicist (born 1756)
• June 20 – Sophia Burrell, English poet and dramatist (born 1753)
• June 29 – Johann Jakob Engel, German teacher and writer (born 1741)
• August 10 – Franz Aepinus, German natural philosopher (born 1724)
• December 27 – Thomas Cadell, English bookseller and publisher (born 1742)

References

References

1. "Dorothy and the daffodils". Wordsworth Trust.
2. Uglow, Jenny. (1 November 2009). "The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi by Andrew McConnell". [[The Guardian]].
3. {{Cite EB1911. Gosse. Edmund
4. "Show me the horrid tenant of thy heart". THEA.
5. (2011). "Love, Sex, Death & Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature". Icon.
6. H. C. Barlow. (1866). "The Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante Allighieri in Florence and at Ravenna by a Representative". Williams and Norgate.
7. (1991). "Human Affairs". VEDA.
8. Sylvia Bowerbank, "Southcott, Joanna (1750–1814)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26050 Retrieved 25 April 2017.]