1859 - Literature

Literature

Nonfiction: Moral and Critical Essays (Essais de morale et de critique) by Ernest Renan, whose work has been published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Journal des Débats. Renan denounces the materialism and intolerance of the Second Empire, advocating an historical, humanistic approach to religion and urging intellectuals to resist tyranny by becoming "bastions of the spirit"; Self-Help by Scottish journalist-turned railway administrator Samuel Smiles, 46, who has been zealous in his advocacy of material progress based on free trade and individual enterprise. Having studied medicine at Edinburgh and qualified as a physician at age 19, when he and his 11 siblings were left fatherless, he gave up his practice, moved to Leeds, edited the reformist Leeds Times from 1838 to 1842, favored practical applications of utilitarian doctrines espoused by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, went into railroad administration in 1845, and 2 years ago published a life of the railroad pioneer George Stephenson; The Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission to China and Japan by Laurence Oliphant; Confidences d'un prestidigatateur by illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, now 53.

Author Bettina von Arnim dies at Berlin January 20 at age 73; historian W. H. Prescott suffers a stroke and dies at his Beacon Hill, Boston, home January 28 at age 62; historian-statesman Alexis de Tocqueville dies at Cannes April 16 at age 53; writer Thomas De Quincey at Edinburgh December 8 at age 74; jurist-author John Austin at Weybridge, Surrey, in December at age 69; writer-statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay at Holly Lodge, Kensington, December 28 at age 59 (he is buried in Westminster Abbey).

Fiction: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, whose novel of the French Revolution begins, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"; Adam Bede by George Eliot gives its author her first wide success; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by English novelist George Meredith, 31; Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, whose protagonist devotes his life to doing absolutely nothing; "Audiberte" (story) by Alphonse Daudet; Him (Lui) by Louise Colet is based on her 8-year liaison with Gustave Flaubert, from whom she has become estranged (the novel creates a sensation); Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In a Two-Story White House, North, Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There by New Hampshire writer Harriet E. Wilson (née Adams) is a fictionalized account of her life that some will call the first novel published by a black American.

Washington Irving dies at his Sunnyside country home on the Hudson River November 28 at age 76; philologist-folklorist Wilhelm C. Grimm at Berlin December 16 at age 73, survived by his older brother Jacob.

Poetry: The Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson is the first in a series of volumes that Tennyson will complete in 1885, bringing Arthurian legend to life with verses about Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, the Lady of Shalott, the Holy Grail, and the towers of fabled Camelot (see Malory, 1471; Caxton, 1484); The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám of Naishapur by English poet-translator Edward Fitzgerald, 50, who puts into graceful English quatrains the rhymed verse of the Persian astronomer-poet who died in 1131: "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,/ A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou/ Beside me, singing in the Wilderness/ Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!" "And much as wine has played the Infidel,/ And robbed me of my Robe of Honor—Well,/ I often wonder what the Vintners buy/ One half so precious as the stuff they sell"; "The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,/ Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line/ Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it"; Mireio by French Provençal poet Frédric Mistral, 29; "The Children's Hour" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow begins, "Between the dark and the daylight,/ When the night is beginning to lower,/ Comes a pause in the day's occupations/ That is known as the Children's Hour."

Poet Leigh Hunt dies at Putney August 28 at age 74.

Juvenile: Ben Sylvester's Word by Charlotte M. Yonge.