1833 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1833.

Events

• January
• The Knickerbocker is established by Charles Fenno Hoffman as The Knickerbacker: or, New-York monthly magazine.
• Alphonse de Lamartine is elected a député of France.
• c. January – Richard Bentley (publisher) issues the first collected edition of Jane Austen's novels.
• February 16 – Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet begin a fifty-year affair. This is recorded in his novel Les Misérables (1862) as the date of Marius and Cosette's wedding night (Part V, Book 6, Chapter 1).
• March 16 – Parley's Magazine, an American periodical for young readers, publishes its first issue in Boston.
• March 25 – Edmund Kean, playing Othello to the Iago of his son, Charles Kean, collapses on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, and dies two months later.
• June 10 – The Dramatic Authors Act passed in the United Kingdom grants playwrights copyright in their work.
• Summer – George Sand and Alfred de Musset begin a two-year affair, recorded in their respective novels Elle et lui (1859) and La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle (1836).
• September 15 – The English poet Arthur Henry Hallam, a close friend of Tennyson and engaged to be married to his sister Emily, dies suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in Vienna aged 22. This year in his memory Tennyson writes "Ulysses" (completed October 20; published in Poems of 1842), "Tithon" (an early version of "Tithonus") and "The Two Voices" (originally entitled "Thoughts of a Suicide"). He begins "Morte d'Arthur" (published 1842) and "Tiresias" (published 1885). In 1850 he will publish In Memoriam A.H.H.
• October 3 – The Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson marries the French composer Hector Berlioz in a civil ceremony at the British Embassy in Paris.
• December 1 – Charles Dickens' first published work of fiction, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", is the first item in what will become Sketches by Boz. It appears unsigned in the Monthly Magazine (London).
• unknown dates
• Publication begins in England of The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, edited by George Long.
• The first of the Bridgewater Treatises, examining science in relation to God, is published in England.
• The first complete German translation of Shakespeare's plays appears: Shakespeares Dramatische Werke, by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck and his daughter Dorothea, and Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin.
• Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer's instructional text The Peep of Day, or, A series of the earliest religious instruction the infant mind is capable of receiving appears in England. It will sell a million copies in 38 languages.
• The first printing press in Jerusalem is set up in the Armenian Quarter.

New books

Fiction

• Honoré de Balzac
• Ferragus
• ' (The Country Doctor)
• Edward Bulwer – Godolphin
• Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus (first book publication)
• Massimo D'Azeglio – Ettore Fieramosca
• Benjamin Disraeli – Alroy
• Cornelia Knight – Sir Guy de Lusignan
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Outre-Mer
• Alfred de Musset (attributed) – Gamiani, ou deux nuits d'excès (Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess)
• John Neal — The Down-Easters, &c. &c. &c.
• Aleksandr Pushkin – Eugene Onegin («Евге́ний Оне́гин», verse novel, first complete book publication)
• George Sand
• Andréa
• Jacques
• Kouroglou / Épopée Persane
• Lelia
• Leone Leoni
• Mattéa
• Michael Scott – Tom Cringle's Log