This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1857.
Events
January 5 – Wilkie Collins' drama The Frozen Deep is first performed in a private amateur performance featuring Charles Dickens, staged by him at his London home, Tavistock House. January 10 – Jules Verne marries Honorine de Viane Morel.
February 7 – Gustave Flaubert's pioneering realist novel Madame Bovary is acquitted (but censured) on charges of offending morals and religion from its 1856 expurgated serialization. It is published complete in book form in April by Michel Lévy Frères in Paris. May 2 – The British Museum Reading Room opens in London. May 5 – American publisher Moses Phillips hosts a dinner for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell and other literary notables at the Parker House Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts, to agree on launching The Atlantic Monthly, "a magazine of literature, art, and politics", on November 1 with Lowell as first editor. June 25 – Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems Les Fleurs du mal is published in Paris. He will be convicted and some of the most decadent poems suppressed on charges of offending morals and religion. August 21 – 24 – Performances of Wilkie Collins' drama The Frozen Deep at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, for the benefit of the widow of writer Douglas William Jerrold (died June 8), during which Charles Dickens, who is directing and performing, becomes infatuated with the professional actress Ellen Ternan. September – Obscene Publications Act 1857 is passed in the United Kingdom, making the sale of obscene material a statutory offence (although it gives no definition of obscenity). William Dugdale, a prime target of the act, is one of the first to be charged under it. The Act is replaced with a less stringent one in 1959. September 25 – Eugène Sue's extended fiction Les Mystères du peuple is condemned on charges of offending morals and religion, the author having died on August 3. October – The Sacramento Library Association, predecessor of Sacramento Public Library, is established as a public subscription library in Sacramento, California, by members of the "Big Four" and other prominent citizens. November 1 – The Atlantic Monthly is first published, in Boston, Massachusetts, by Phillips, Sampson and Company. unknown dates – George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life are published as a serial in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine through the year, as her first work of fiction and the first use of her pseudonym.
New books
Fiction
Hans Christian Andersen – To Be or Not to Be
Matilda Betham-Edwards – The White House by the Sea
George Borrow – The Romany Rye
Charlotte Brontë (posthumously, as Currer Bell) – The Professor
Juliet H. Lewis Campbell (as Judith Canute) – Eros and Antieros; or, The Bachelor's Ward Wilkie Collins – The Dead Secret Charles De Coster – Légendes flamandes Charles Dickens – Little Dorrit (complete in book form) Alexandre Dumas, père The Companions of Jehu The Wolf Leader Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich – Ciekawyś? Przeczytaj! Trzy powiastki i wierszyk ulotny (Interested? Read it! Three tales and brief verse) Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary Théophile Gautier – Jettatura (The Jinx) Catherine Gore – The Two Aristocracies George A. Lawrence (anonymously) – Guy Livingstone, or Thorough Fitz Hugh Ludlow – The Hasheesh Eater Herman Melville – The Confidence-Man G. W. M. Reynolds – The Necromancer X. B. Saintine – Seul (Alone) Catharine Maria Sedgwick – Married or Single? María del Pilar Sinués de Marco - El ángel del hogar Adalbert Stifter – Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer) William Makepeace Thackeray – The Virginians (begins serialisation) Anthony Trollope – Barchester Towers
Children and young people
R. M. Ballantyne
The Coral Island
Ungava: a Tale of Eskimo Land
Clara de Chatelain – Little Folk's Books (initially in four volumes) Thomas Hughes – Tom Brown's Schooldays Annie Keary – The Heroes of Asgard (with Eliza Harriett Keary)
Drama
Wilkie Collins (with Charles Dickens) – The Frozen Deep
Ferdinand Dugué – William Shakespeare: drame en six actes
Liautaud Ethéart – Le Monde de Chez Nous
Charles Heavysege – Saul: a drama in three parts
Henrik Ibsen – The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland) Andreas Munch – Lord William Russell Ramnarayan Tarkaratna – Kulīn-Kul-Sarbasva (A. Kulīn's All in All)