This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1823.
Events
February 7 – The Bannatyne Club is inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott and others as a text publication society to print by subscription rare texts on the history, literature and traditions of Scotland. October – Thomas De Quincey's classic essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" appears in this month's issue of The London Magazine. May 23 – Russian writer Alexander Pushkin begins work on his verse novel Eugene Onegin. December – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, suffering from opium addiction, moves to No. 3, The Grove, Highgate, a house owned by Dr James Gillman. December 15 – John Neal sails for England where he became the first American author published in British literary journals. December 23 – Clement Clarke Moore's poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas is published anonymously in the Troy, New York, Sentinel, and introduces the eponym "Santa Claus". Unknown dates Discovery of the 1603 First Quarto edition of William Shakespeare's Hamlet (a so-called "bad quarto"), by Sir Henry Bunbury, causes scholarly excitement. London actor Edmund Kean reinstates in performance the original, tragic ending of Shakespeare's play King Lear, not generally used since 1681, although it is not well received. The London publisher C. Baldwyn brings out the first English translation of Grimms' Fairy Tales as German Popular Stories. Translated from the Kinder und Haus Märchen collected by MM. Grimm from Oral Tradition. The anonymous translations were made by two lawyers, Edgar Taylor and David Jardine, and the illustrations by George Cruikshank, who is beginning to focus on this medium.
New books
Fiction
Willibald Alexis – Walladmor
James Fenimore Cooper – The Pioneers
Claire de Duras – Ourika
John Galt
The Entail, or The Lairds of Grippy
The Gathering of the West
Ringan Gilhaize, or The Covenanters
The Spaewife: a tale of the Scottish chronicles
Thomas Gaspey – Monks of Leadenhead
Sarah Green – The Nieces
Jane Harvey – Mountalyth
William Hazlitt – Liber Amoris
Victor Hugo – Han d'Islande
Grace Kennedy – Father Clement
Caroline Lamb – Ada Reis
John Gibson Lockhart – Reginald Dalton
Mary Meeke – What Shall Be, Shall Be
John Neal
Logan, a Family History (London edition) Seventy-Six Randolph, A Novel Errata; or, the Works of Will. Adams James Kirke Paulding – Koningsmarke, the Long Finne Sir Walter Scott (anonymously) Peveril of the Peak Quentin Durward St. Ronan's Well Mary Shelley – Valperga John Wilson – The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay Anonymous – Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations
Short stories
Ernst Raupach – "Wake Not the Dead"
Children and young people
Mrs Markham (Elizabeth Penrose) – A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the End of the Reign of George III
Drama
Aleksander Griboyedov – Woe from Wit («Горе от ума», written) Franz Grillparzer - König Ottokars Glück und Ende (written 1823, premiered February 19, 1825 in Vienna's Burgtheater). Felicia Hemans – The Vespers of Palermo Mary Russell Mitford – Julian Richard Brinsley Peake – Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein James Planché – Cortez Eugène Scribe L'Héritière (The Heiress, for the Théâtre du Gymnase) Le Menteur Veridique (The Veritable Liar) William Tennant – Cardinal Beaton
Poetry
Thomas Campbell – The Last Man
Alphonse de Lamartine – Nouvelles méditations poétiques
Adam Mickiewicz – Grażyna
Henry Neele – Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous
Percy Bysshe Shelley – Posthumous Poems
Non-fiction
Alexandre Bertrand – Traité du somnambulisme
William Buckland – Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, or, Observations on the Organic Remains attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge Lorenzo Da Ponte – Memorie Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases – Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène John Franklin – Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea Ethan Smith – View of the Hebrews