Events
- January–March – Oscar Wilde, imprisoned in Reading Gaol in England, writes a letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis.
- January 2 – Newspapers in London erroneously report the death of Mark Twain. It is believed the rumors began when Twain's cousin had become ill. Twain makes his famous statement, "The report of my death was an exaggeration."[1]
- April–December – H. G. Wells' science fiction novel The War of the Worlds is serialized in Pearson's Magazine (London).
- April 13 – The Grand Guignol is opened in Paris by Oscar Méténier.
- May 19 – Oscar Wilde is released early this morning from Pentonville Prison in London, to which he has been transferred from Reading via Twyford the previous night. This afternoon he visits Hatchards bookshop briefly before catching an evening train to Newhaven, on his way to exile on the continent under the pseudonym "Sebastian Melmoth".
- May 26
- The theatrical manager Bram Stoker's contemporary Gothic horror novel Dracula is published in London by Constable with a late change of title from The Un-Dead. It will influence vampire literature for the following century.[2] On May 18 he had staged a reading of a dramatised version for copyright purposes before an audience of two at the Lyceum Theatre, London.[3]
- The original manuscript of William Bradford's history, Of Plymouth Plantation, is returned to the Governor of Massachusetts by the Bishop of London after being taken during the American Revolutionary War.
- June 22 – Moscow Art Theatre is formed by Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.[4]
- July 2 – The Yorkshire Dialect Society is founded, the oldest such society in England.
- July 25 – The writer Jack London sails to join the Klondike Gold Rush, where he will write his first successful stories.
- October – The first issue of Albina, a Romanian literary and agriculturalist magazine aimed at a peasant readership, is published in Bucharest by Ioan Kalinderu, George Coșbuc and Petre Dulfu.[5]
- November 1 – The Library of Congress Building in Washington, D.C., is opened.
- December 28 – Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac opens at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris with the theater's director, Coquelin aîné, in the title role. The applause lasts for more than an hour.
- December 30 – The comedy The White Horse Inn (Im weißen Rößl), by Oscar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg, opens in Berlin. Decades later it will be turned into a successful musical play.[6]
- unknown dates
- Hall Caine's novel The Christian: a story is published and becomes the first in Britain to sell a million copies. The author also writes a dramatization.[7]
- Anna Katharine Green's That Affair Next Door introduces the first female fictional detective character in a novel, Amelia Butterworth, an inquisitive New York society spinster.[8]
- Benito Pérez Galdós is elected to the Real Academia Española.
- The publisher Doubleday is founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company by Frank Nelson Doubleday[9] in partnership with magazine publisher Samuel McClure in New York City.
- The publisher Commercial Press (simplified Chinese: 商务印书馆; traditional Chinese: 商務印書館; pinyin: Shāngwù Yìnshūguǎn) is founded as the first modern publishing organisation in China, by 26-year-old Xia Ruifang and three friends in Shanghai.