Calendar of Literary Facts

1821

  • John Clare publishes The Village Minstrel and Other Poems
  • Simón Bolívar’s troops defeat Spanish forces at the Battle of Carabobo, a victory which gains independence for Venezuela
  • Nicaragua, Peru, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama gain their independence from Spain
  • Michael Faraday discovers and documents electromagnetic rotation, the principle behind the electric motor
  • The Greek War of Independence is waged, with Greece seeking freedom the Ottoman Empire
  • John Cleland’s Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure becomes the subject of an obscenity trial in Massachusetts
  • The Saturday Evening Post is founded (August 4)
  • Charles Baudelaire is born (April 9)
  • Fedor Dostoevsky is born (November 11)
  • Gustave Flaubert is born (December 12)
  • Mary Ann Morse Baker (Mary Baker Eddy) is born (July 16)
  • A friend of Blackwood’s Magazine editor John Gibson Lockhart, affronted by published attacks on Lockhart, fatally wounds London Magazine editor John Scott in a duel with pistols (February 16)
  • John Keats dies (February 23)