Events
- January 1 – The children's literary magazine Young Folks begins publication in the United Kingdom as Our Young Folks' Weekly Budget.[1]
- January – John Ruskin begins publishing Fors Clavigera, his originally monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain".
- March 18–May 28 – The Paris Commune is influential on the literary figures in the city at the time and far beyond:
- Jules Vallès publishes his newspaper Le Cri du Peuple February 22–May 23 (with interruptions).
- At the beginning of April, Victor Hugo moves to Brussels to take care of the family of his son, who has just died, but closely follows events in Paris, on April 21 publishing the poem "Pas de représailles" (No reprisals) and on June 11 writing the poem "Sur une barricade" (On the barricade).
- Émile Zola, as a journalist for Le Sémaphore de Marseille, reports the fall of the Commune, and is one of the first reporters to enter the city during Semaine sanglante (Bloody Week, beginning May 21).
- October – "Thomas Maitland", i. e. Robert Williams Buchanan, attacks Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of what Buchanan calls the "Fleshly School" of English poetry in The Contemporary Review. On December 16 Rossetti replies in "The Stealthy School of Criticism" in the Athenaeum.
- November 25 – First performance of The Bells starring Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre, London,[2] the actor's first great success. On the same night, he breaks up permanently with his wife when she criticises his choice of profession.
- December – Publication of George Eliot's novel Middlemarch in eight parts commences.[3]
- unknown date – George Allen and Sons, publishers, predecessors of Allen & Unwin, is established in London.
