1812 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1812.

Events

• January 2 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lecture on Hamlet is given as part of a series of lectures on drama and Shakespeare; it has influenced Hamlet studies ever since.
• January 15 – Lord Byron takes his seat in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
• March 20 – First two cantos of Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are published in London by John Murray. This sells out in five days, giving rise to Byron's comment "I awoke one morning and found myself famous."
• May–July – The library of the Duke of Roxburghe (died 1804) is auctioned in London. On June 17 a presumed first edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, printed by Christopher Valdarfer of Venice in 1471, is sold to the Marquis of Blandford for £2,260, the highest price ever given for a book at that time. This is followed by a social meeting of bibliophiles under the chairmanship of 2nd Earl Spencer, the origin of the Roxburghe Club, formed by Thomas Frognall Dibdin.
• June 24–December 14 – The French invasion of Russia will form the climax of Tolstoy's 1869 novel War and Peace and feature several other works of literature.
• October 10 – The rebuilt Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London opens.
• December 9–20 – Leigh Hunt is tried and convicted of libel for calling the Prince Regent "a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace" in The Examiner on March 22.
• December 26 – Novelist Frederick Marryat is promoted to lieutenant after distinguished service at sea in the War of 1812.

New books

Fiction

• Sarah Burney – Traits of Nature
• Maria Edgeworth:
• The Absentee
• Emilie de Coulanges
• Vivian
• Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès – Fantasmagoriana
• The Brothers Grimm – Grimm's Fairy Tales, volume 1 (Kinder- und Hausmärchen)
• Ann Hatton – The Fortress del Vechii
• Frances Margaretta Jacson (misascribed to Mary Brunton) – Things by their Right Names
• Charles Maturin – The Milesian Chief
• Rebecca Rush – Kelroy
• George Soane – The Eve of San Marco
• Louisa Stanhope – The Confessional of Valombre
• Elizabeth Thomas – The Vindictive Spirit
• Jane West – The Loyalists: An Historical Novel

Children and young people

• Barbara Hofland – The History of a Clergyman's Widow and Her Young Family
• Johann David Wyss – The Swiss Family Robinson

Drama

• Joanna Baillie – Orra
• Theodor Körner
• Die Braut (The Bride)
• Der grüne Domino (The Green Domino)
• Der Nachtwächter (The Night Watchman)
• Zriny
• Adam Oehlenschläger – Stærkodder
• August von Kotzebue – Der arme Poet (The Poor Poet)

Poetry

• Anna Laetitia Barbauld – Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
• Lord Byron – Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – '
• James and Horace Smith (anonymously) – Rejected Addresses
• William Tennant – Anster Fair