1817 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1817.

List of years in literature (table)
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Events

• January 27 – March 18 – Jane Austen begins, but abandons her novel Sanditon ("Three Brothers").[1]
• February 12 – Junius Brutus Booth makes his stage debut in the title role of Shakespeare's Richard III at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in London.[2]
• February 20 – Junius Brutus Booth as Iago plays opposite Edmund Kean in the title role of Othello at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London.[2]
• March – Percy and Mary Shelley with Claire Clairmont and the latter's new daughter by Lord Byron, Allegra (at this time called Alba), having moved from Bath, begin a year's residence in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, England, where Mary completes Frankenstein and gives birth to her third child, and Percy writes The Revolt of Islam.[3]
• April 1 – Blackwood's Magazine is launched as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine. In October the publisher, William Blackwood, relaunches it as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
• August 6 – Gas lighting on stage is introduced in London's English Opera House (extended to the auditorium on September 8). On September 6 it is introduced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where it has already been installed in the auditorium and foyer, and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, as a demonstration.[4]
• December 18 – 20 – William Hone successfully defends himself in a London court on charges arising from his publication of political satires.
• December 28 – English painter Benjamin Haydon introduces John Keats to William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb at a dinner in London to celebrate progress on his painting Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, in which all feature.[5]
• December 31 – Walter Scott's historical novel Rob Roy, written from this spring, is published anonymously by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh, while a shipload of copies is carried from Leith to London for simultaneous publication there by Longman.[6]
• December – Jane Austen's first and last completed novels, respectively Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are published together by John Murray in London (dated 1818), six months after the author's death at Winchester. Her brother Henry Austen contributes a biographical note, which first publicly identifies her as the author of her previously anonymous novels. She had earned £684 in her lifetime from her writing.

Uncertain date

• J. & J. Harper publishing house is founded in New York City by James Harper and his brother John.

New books

Fiction

• Jane Austen
  • Northanger Abbey
  • Persuasion
• Selina Davenport – Woman's Privilege
• Maria Edgeworth
  • Harrington: a tale
  • Ormond: a tale
• Ann Hatton – Gonzalo de Baldivia
• John Neal – Keep Cool
• Thomas Love Peacock – Melincourt.
• Anna Maria Porter – The Knight of St. John
• Walter Scott – Rob Roy
• Catherine Selden – Villa Santelle
• Elizabeth Thomas – Claudine, or Pertinacity

Drama

• Franz Grillparzer – Die Ahnfrau (The Ancestress)
• Richard Lalor Sheil – The Apostate
• George Soane
  • The Bohemian: a Tragedy
  • The Falls of Clyde: a Melodrama
  • The Inn-Keeper's Daughter
• Zachary Zealoushead – Plots and Placement

Poetry

• Lord Byron – Manfred: A Dramatic Poem
• Thomas Moore – Lalla-Rookh: An Oriental Romance
• Henry Neele – Odes and Other Poems
• Percy Bysshe Shelley – Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
• Robert Southey – Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem
• Charles Wolfe – The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna

Non-fiction

• Franz Xaver von Baader – Über die Extase oder das Verzücktsein der magnetischen Schlafredner
• William Cobbett – Paper against Gold: the History and Mystery of the Bank of England
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Biographia Literaria
• Nathan Drake – Shakespeare and his Times (2 volumes)
• Eliza Fay (posthumously) – Original Letters from India
• William Hazlitt – Characters of Shakespear's Plays
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
• James Mill – The History of British India[7]
• David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
• Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley – History of a Six Weeks' Tour

Births

• February 21 – José Zorrilla y Moral, Spanish poet and dramatist (died 1893)
• March 19 – Jozef Miloslav Hurban, Slovak writer, radical and minister (died 1886)
• May 21 – Hermann Lotze, German philosopher (died 1881)
• July 12 – Henry David Thoreau, American poet and philosopher (died 1862)
• September 5 – Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Russian poet, dramatist and novelist (died 1875)
• September 14 – Theodor Storm, German novelist and poet (died 1888)
• December 31 – James Thomas Fields, American publisher (died 1881)

Deaths

• March 23 – José Mariano Beristain, Mexican bibliographer (born 1756)[8]
• April 25 – Joseph von Sonnenfels, Austrian novelist (born 1732)[9]
• May 24 – Juan Meléndez Valdés, Spanish poet (born 1754)
• July 14 – Germaine de Staël, French woman of letters (born 1766)[10]
• July 18 – Jane Austen, English novelist (born 1775)[11]
• December 28 – Charles Burney, English classicist (born 1757)

Uncertain dates

• Caleb Bingham, American textbook author (born 1757)
• Joakim Stulić, Croatian lexicographer (born 1730)
• Tarikonda Venkamamba, Telugu woman poet (born 1730)

References

1. Lane, Anthony (6 March 2017). "Reading Jane Austen's Final, Unfinished Novel". The Newyorker. Retrieved 26 March 2019.
2. Taylor, Dave (2013-12-28). "When Junius Took the Stage – Part 5". BoothieBarn. Retrieved 2014-05-20.
3. "The Shelleys Move to Marlow – Frankenstein Completed". Frankenstein Diaries. Retrieved 2020-08-03.
4. "Theatres Compete in Race to Install Gas Illumination – 1817" (PDF). Over The Footlights. Retrieved 2014-05-20.
5. Plumly, Stanley (2014). The Immortal Evening: a legendary dinner with Keats, Wordsworth and Lamb. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0-393-08099-5.
6. Scott, Walter (2010) [1829]. Lang, Andrew (ed.). Rob Roy. Norwalk, CT: Easton Press. p. 69. It is an event unprecedented in the annals either of literature or of the custom-house that the entire cargo of a packet, or smack, bound from Leith to London, should be the impression of a novel.
7. Mihir Bose: A Hatred for Hindus, History Today (Vol 66/12, December 2016), p. 3.
8.  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "José Mariano Beristain y Martin de Souza". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
9. Heiner F. Klemme; Manfred Kuehn (30 June 2016). The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 730. ISBN 978-1-4742-5600-1.
10. Germaine de Staël; Madame De Sta?l; Stael, Mad (1998). Corinne, Or Italy. Oxford University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-19-282505-6.
11. "BBC - History - Jane Austen". www.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 26 March 2019.