#OTD in 1854.
Wilkie Collins's "The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter", published as "The Fourth Poor Traveller" in The Seven Poor Travellers – the Household Words special Christmas number – is the first non-police detective fiction published in Britain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkie_Collins
The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1626
#OTD in 1847.
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey are published in a three-volume set under the pen names of Ellis and Acton Bell respectively, in London by T. C. Newby. Wuthering Heights will be Emily's only published novel, as she dies a year later, aged 30.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights
Wuthering Heights at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/768
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Grey
Agnes Grey at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/767
"Man is not truly one, but truly two."
#OTD (and January 9) in 1886.
Robert Louis Stevenson's horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appears in New York and London. Almost 40,000 copies are sold in the first six months. By 1901, it was estimated to have sold over 250,000 copies in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/43
"Ah! the death of the poor, the empty entrails, howling hunger, the animal appetite that leads one with chattering teeth to fill one’s stomach with beastly refuse in this great Paris, so bright and golden! "
Chapter XII
#OTD in 1877.
Émile Zola's L'Assommoir, 7th in his novel sequence Les Rougon-Macquart, is first published in book format a few weeks after its serialisation ends in Le Bien public (Paris).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Assommoir
L´Assommoir at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=L%27Assommoir&submit_search=Go%21
#OTD in 1835.
Abolitionist Susan Paul officiates at a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) in Boston. Later in the year, her Memoir of James Jackson becomes the earliest-known published narrative by an African-American woman and the first account documenting the life of a free black child in the United States.
#OTD in 1911.
The U.K. Copyright Act consolidates copyright law in the British Empire and confirms the six libraries to which a copy of every book published in the U.K. must be deposited by the publisher: the British Museum Library (London); the Bodleian Library (Oxford); the Advocates Library (Edinburgh); the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth); Trinity College Dublin; and Cambridge University Library.
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
This video from the London Review of Books (LRB) celebrates the Folio’s 400th anniversary by documenting an audacious attempt to replicate the methods used to print the book at the time of its original release.
https://aeon.co/videos/replicating-shakespearean-era-printing-brings-its-own-dramas-and-comedy
" I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking."
Have His Carcase
English author, poet, and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers died #OTD in 1957. Sayers is most famous for her detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, an aristocratic amateur sleuth. She wrote several plays, including The Zeal of Thy House and The Man Born to Be King. Sayers also translated major works, notably Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Dorothy L. Sayers at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/45867
#OTD in 1824.
The first issue of a radical quarterly founded by Jeremy Bentham, The Westminster Review, is published in London.
It was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal until 1828. Some notable contributors: George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, Mary Shelley, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Caroline Cornwallis, Julia Wedgwood, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy.
HAPPY PUBLIC DOMAIN DAY!
Books which will enter the US public domain:
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine)
John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold (Steinbeck's first novel)
Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story
Patrick Hamilton, Rope
#OTD in 1818.
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus first appears anonymously in London.
Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
1818 edition at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/41445
1831 edition
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/42324
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#OTD in 1873.
Louisa May Alcott's family satire "Transcendental Wild Oats" is published in the newspaper The Independent.
The work was first published in a New York newspaper in 1873, and reprinted in 1874, 1876, and 1915 and after. Alcott's view of male arrogance and female exploitation in this piece is paralleled in her novel Work, published in the same year as Transcendental Wild Oats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_Wild_Oats
Transcendental Wild Oats at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34920
J. J. Thomson, who was born #OTD in 1856, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.
Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson and Edward Victor Appleton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson
Books by J.J. Thomson at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/38322
"Thus, after pursuing those images, I overtook them. Now I know that I invented them. But inventing is a creation, not a lie."
La coscienza di Zeno (1923)
#OTD in 1928.
Italo Svevo (Aron Schmitz), returning from an Alpine resort to Trieste, suffers a car accident. He dies next day leaving his novel Il Vegliardo (The Old Man) unfinished in mid-word.
"THE times that tried men's souls," are over- and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished."
#OTD in 1776.
Thomas Paine publishes one of a series of pamphlets in The Pennsylvania Journal entitled "The American Crisis". Paine signed the pamphlets with the pseudonym, "Common Sense".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Crisis
The American Crisis at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3741
#OTD in 1864 (until April 16).
James Payn publishes his most popular story, Lost Sir Massingberd, in Chambers's Journal. He follows it in the magazine (August 6 – December 24) by Married Beneath Him. Lost Sir Massingberd was published as a book in two volumes in 1864.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Sir_Massingberd
Lost Sir Massingberd at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37170
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37171
"Nothing is stranger to man than his own image."
#OTD in 1921.
World premiere of the science fiction play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti) by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in a theater in Hradec Králové. It introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
R.U.R. at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/59112
"Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way."
From January 4 till August 8 1868.
Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Moonstone: a Romance is serialised in All the Year Round (U.K.), being published in book format in July by Tinsley Brothers of London. It is seen as a precursor of full-length mystery fiction and the psychological thriller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moonstone
The Moonstone at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/155
#OTD in 1893.
The first story featuring the private detective character Sexton Blake, "The Missing Millionaire", appears in Alfred Harmsworth's new boys' story paper The Halfpenny Marvel, written by Harry Blyth under the pen-name Hal Meredeth.
Sexton Blake adventures were featured in a wide variety of British and international publications from 1893 to 1978, comprising more than 4,000 stories by some 200 different authors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexton_Blake
"What remains?" cried Ivanhoe; "Glory, maiden, glory! which gilds our sepulchre and embalms our name."
#OTD in 1819.
Walter Scott's popular Waverley Novel Ivanhoe is published anonymously in 3 volumes by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh, dated 1820. A chivalric romance set in 12th-century England, it represents a move away from Scott setting his fiction in Scotland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe
Ivanhoe at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/82
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On Henry James and the Enduring Lessons of Love
Katherine J. Chen Rediscovers James (and Falls in Love)
https://lithub.com/on-henry-james-and-the-enduring-lessons-of-love/
Books by Henry James at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/113
#OTD in 1895.
The première of Oscar Wilde's comedy An Ideal Husband takes place at the Haymarket Theatre in London. In April, on the last day of the Haymarket run, Wilde was arrested for gross indecency; his name was removed from the playbills and programmes when the production transferred to the Criterion Theatre, where it ran for a further 13 performances, from 13 to 27 April.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Ideal_Husband
An Ideal Husband at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/885
#OTD in 1846.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's first original novel, Poor Folk, is published in the St. Petersburg Collection.
The first English translation was provided by Lena Milman in 1894, with an introduction by George Moore, cover art design by Aubrey Beardsley and publication by London's Mathews and Lane. It is the first novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, written over the span of nine months between 1844 and 1845.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Folk
Poor Folk at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2302
![Title page of Lost Sir Massingberd.
The book is in two volumes, with this being Volume I.
Published in London by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, located at 14, Ludgate Hill, in 1864.
It includes the note: "[The Right of Translation is Reserved.]".](/proxy/post_attachment/567629/66fd41f7dd.png "Title page of Lost Sir Massingberd.
The book is in two volumes, with this being Volume I.
Published in London by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, located at 14, Ludgate Hill, in 1864.
It includes the note: \"[The Right of Translation is Reserved.]\".")
