Events
- January – The Ottoman illustrated magazine Servet-i Fünun is taken over by Tevfik Fikret, who turns it into a vehicle for Edebiyat-ı Cedide ("New Literature"). These writers are committed to conservatism and Ottomanism, rather than Turkish nationalism, but also favor Westernization. They use a "recondite and obscure" Ottoman language within the framework of aestheticism.[1]
- January–May – H. G. Wells' first "scientific romance", the novella The Time Machine, is published serially in The New Review (London). The first book editions are published by Henry Holt and Company in New York on May 7 and Heinemann in London on May 29.
- January 3 – The première of Oscar Wilde's comedy An Ideal Husband takes place at the Haymarket Theatre in London.
- January 5
- The première of Henry James's historical drama Guy Domville held at St James's Theatre in London is booed.
- A. E. Waite ceases to publish and edit his occult periodical The Unknown World.
- January 12 – The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty is registered in England and begins acquiring properties and making them accessible to the public. Carlyle's House in Chelsea is one of the first to open.
- February – The Bookman (New York), a monthly, is first published by Dodd, Mead and Company with Harry Thurston Peck as editor. It publishes the first bestseller list, which is headed by Frank R. Stockton's novel The Adventures of Captain Horn.
- February 14 – Oscar Wilde's last play, the comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, opens at St James's Theatre, London.[3]
- February 18 – The Marquess of Queensberry (father of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover), leaves a calling card at the Albemarle Club in London inscribed: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite", i. e. sodomite, inducing Wilde to charge him with criminal libel.[4] In a meeting on March 25 at the Café Royal in London, Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw fail to dissuade Wilde from proceeding with the action.
- March 4 – George du Maurier's play, Trilby, based on his novel of the same name, serialised in 1894 and first published in book form in 1895, opens at the Boston Museum in the United States, with a New York première on April 15 at the Garden Theatre. Wilton Lackaye plays Svengali and Virginia Harned the title rôle.
- April/May – Pan, a German arts and literary magazine, is first published, in Berlin.
- April 3–5 – Queensberry is acquitted in the libel case of Wilde v Queensberry at the Old Bailey in London. Evidence of Wilde's homosexual relationships with young men renders him liable to criminal prosecution under the Labouchere Amendment, while the Libel Act 1843 renders him legally liable for the considerable expenses Queensberry has incurred in his defence, leaving Wilde penniless.
- April 6 – Oscar Wilde is arrested at the Cadogan Hotel, London, in the company of Robbie Ross, for "unlawfully committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons". He is detained on remand in Holloway Prison.
- April 29 – Joseph Conrad's novel Almayer's Folly is published in London by T. Fisher Unwin, as Conrad's first published work, after retirement from his career at sea. It marks the first appearance of his pseudonym.
- May 23 – Representatives of the Astor Library and Lenox Library, with the backing of Samuel J. Tilden, agree to merge and form the New York Public Library.
- May 25
- After a retrial of the criminal case of Regina v. Wilde at the Old Bailey, Oscar Wilde is convicted of gross indecency and taken to Pentonville Prison to begin a two-year sentence of hard labour.[5] In June he requests to read in his cell Pater's The Renaissance, Augustine's Confessions and works by Baudelaire and Newman. On November 21 he is transferred to Reading Gaol.
- Henry Irving becomes the first English actor to be knighted as such.[6]
- June 21 – William Poel's newly formed Elizabethan Stage Society, created to promote productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the assumed style of the English Renaissance theatre, gives its first performance, at Burlington Hall.[7]
- September 7 – The stage version of Trilby (see March 4) has its UK première at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, with a London première on October 30 at the Haymarket Theatre), with Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Dorothea Baird. The play is so successful that Tree can use the profits to build Her Majesty's Theatre. It also popularises the trilby hat.
- October
- The American Historical Review appears for the first time.[8]
- Stephen Crane's American Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage is first published in an abridged book format by D. Appleton & Company in New York.
- Rudyard Kipling publishes the story "Mowgli Leaves the Jungle Forever" in The Cosmopolitan illustrated magazine in the United States, concluding the series collected in The Second Jungle Book, published in England in November.
- November 1 – Thomas Hardy's last completed novel, Jude the Obscure is published by Osgood, McIlvaine, and Co. in London, dated 1896, on completion of an expurgated serialization under the title Hearts Insurgent in Harper's Magazine. It is strongly criticized on moral grounds. Hardy later claims that Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, burned a copy.[9]
- c. December – Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the future Joseph Stalin, publishes his romantic poems in the newspaper Iveria, receiving accolades from a senior writer, Ilia Chavchavadze.[10]
- December 19 – Robert Frost marries Elinor Miriam White at Lawrence, Massachusetts.[11]
- unknown dates
- Abdallah bin Hemedi bin Ali Ajjemy's Habari za Wakilindi is the first novel to be published in the Swahili language.[12]
- Castello Holford's utopian novel Aristopia: A Romance-History of the New World, appears in Boston as the first full-length alternate history in English.
- Ernest Thayer recites Casey at the Bat at a Harvard class reunion, appearing to resolve a mystery about the poem's authorship.
- The first edition of the Times Atlas of the World is published at the office of The Times newspaper in London.
- Hall Caine travels in the United States and Canada, representing the U.K. Society of Authors. He obtains international copyright concessions from the Dominion Parliament.[13]
