This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1816.
Events
Volume 1 of The Portico: A Repository of Science & Literature
January – The Portico: A Repository of Science & Literature launched in Baltimore with poetry, literary criticism, and essays by John Neal and others.[1]
April – Lord Byron leaves England for good to tour continental Europe.
April 14 – Lord Byron's poems "A Sketch from Private Life" and "Fare Thee Well", about his separation from his wife Anne Isabella, are published without authority in The Champion.
May – Lady Caroline Lamb's novel Glenarvon is the first book published independently by Henry Colburn in London. A roman à clef, it contains an unflattering portrait of her ex-lover Lord Byron in the rakish title character of Lord Glenarvon[2] and provokes Purity of Heart; Or, The Ancient Costume: A Tale, in One Volume, Addressed to the Author of Glenarvon, "a virulent, polemical novel" by "An old wife of twenty years", actually clergyman's spouse Elizabeth Thomas.[3]
July – Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Polidori, who have gathered at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in a rainy Switzerland in this 'Year Without a Summer', tell each other tales. This spawns to two classic Gothic narratives, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre (based on Byron's "Fragment of a Novel"). Byron also writes the poem Darkness. In late August Shelley and Godwin return to England, taking with them some of Byron's manuscripts for his publisher.
Lord Byron's Monody on the Death of the Right Honourable R. B. Sheridan, written at the request of Douglas Kinnaird, is spoken at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London by Mrs. Maria Davison.[4]
Actor William Macready makes his London debut at Covent Garden, as Orestes in The Distressed Mother, a translation of Racine's Andromaque made by Ambrose Philips.
December – John Keats composes the poem "Sleep and Poetry" while staying at the Hampstead house of his friend Leigh Hunt, who introduces him to Shelley.
December 5 – Lord Byron's The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems is published in London. John Murray, his publisher, is able to sell 7,000 copies of this and of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III (published November 18) to booksellers at a dinner this month.
Publication in Mexico of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's comic picaresque novelThe Mangy Parrot: The Life and Times of Periquillo Sarniento written by himself for his children (El Periquillo Sarniento) in installments, generally seen as the first novel written and published in Latin America, although government censorship prevents the final chapters from being published until the 1830s.[6][7]
Shakespeare's Hamlet is for the first time performed at the castle of Kronborg in Helsingør (Elsinore, Denmark), where it is set.[8]
Franz Bopp – Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Statesman's Manual; or, The Bible the best guide to political skill and foresight: a lay sermon
John Hoyland – A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, and Present State of the Gypsies
Nikolay Karamzin – History of the Russian State (История государства Российского, Istoriya gosudarstva Rossiyskogo; publication begins)
George Sinclair – Hortus gramineus Woburnensis
Births
February 18 – Ferdinand Dugué, French poet and playwright (died 1913)
July 23 – Elizabeth Hamilton, Irish-born Scottish essayist, poet and novelist (born c. 1756)
September 9 – Eliza Fay, English letter-writer and traveller (born 1755 or 1756)
October 27 – Santō Kyōden (real name Iwase Samuru), Japanese fiction writer, poet and artist (born 1761)
References
^Mott, Frank Luther (1966). A History of American Magazines: 1741-1850. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 294. OCLC 715774796, 4th printing
^Douglass, Malcolm Paul (2004-10-19). "Caroline Lamb: Glenarvon". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2014-02-12.
^Coleman, Deirdre (2007). "Thomas, Elizabeth (1770/71–1855)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.
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