This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1802.
Events
April 15 – William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth walk by Ullswater and see a belt of daffodils, which inspires his poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", written two years later. April 19 – Joseph Grimaldi first presents his white-faced clown character "Joey", at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. Summer – Adam Oehlenschläger writes at one sitting the poem "Guldhornene", introducing Romanticism into Danish poetry. July 31 – William Wordsworth, leaving London for Dover and Calais with Dorothy, witnesses an early morning scene he captures in a Petrarchan sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge". In Calais, he will meet his 9-year-old illegitimate daughter Caroline for the first time. October 4 – William Wordsworth marries Mary Hutchinson at Brompton, Scarborough. October 10 – The Edinburgh Review, a reforming quarterly, is first published. November 13 – The first play in English explicitly called a melodrama ("mélodrame") is performed in London: Thomas Holcroft's Gothic A Tale of Mystery (an unacknowledged translation of de Pixerécourt's Cœlina, ou, l'enfant du mystère), at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. November 15 – Washington Irving makes a first appearance in print at the age of nineteen, with observational letters to the New York Morning Chronicle under the name Jonathan Oldstyle. December 2–3 – Jane Austen accepts, then rejects, a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither at his Hampshire home. unknown dates Henry Boyd completes the first full English translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron's Latin translation of Oupneck'hat is published, the first published translation of the Upanishads into a Western language. The first part of Jippensha Ikku's picaresque novel Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige (東海道中膝栗毛, Shank's Mare) is published in Japan.
New books
Fiction
François-René de Chateaubriand – René
Elizabeth Craven – The Soldiers of Dierenstein
John Gilchrist – Hindee Story Teller
Elizabeth Gunning – The Farmer's Boy
Jane Harvey – Warkfield Castle
Rachel Hunter – The History of the Grubthorpe Family
Isabella Kelly – The Baron's Daughter
Francis Lathom – Astonishment
Mary Meeke
Independence
Midnight Weddings
Mary Pilkington – The Accusing Spirit
Anne Louise Germaine de Stael – Delphine
Jane West – The Infidel Father
Drama
Charles-Guillaume Étienne – Les Deux Mères
Heinrich Joseph von Collin – Coriolan
Lumley Skeffington – The Word of Honour
Poetry
Walter Scott, ed. – Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
Non-fiction
Saul Ascher – Ideen zur natürlichen Geschichte der politischen Revolutionen (Ideas toward a Natural History of Political Revolutions) Jeremy Bentham – Civil War and Penal Legislation Jacob Boehme – Les Trois Principes de l'Essence Divine (translated into French by Louis Claude de Saint-Martin) François-René de Chateaubriand – Génie du christianisme (The Genius of Christianity) John Debrett – Debrett's Peerage (first edition) John Home – History of the Rebellion of 1745 Malcolm Laing – History of Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdoms Louis Claude de Saint-Martin – Le Ministère de l'homme-esprit Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling – Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge (Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things) Joanna Southcott – The Strange Effects of Faith; with Remarkable Prophecies (with fifth and final part) Noah Webster – The Rights of Neutral Nations in Time of War
Births
January 9 – Catharine Parr Traill, English-Canadian memoirist and children's author (died 1899) February 11 – Lydia Maria Child, American abolitionist, activist, novelist, and journalist (died 1880) February 26 – Victor Hugo, French novelist and poet (died 1885) June 2 – Karl Lehrs, German classicist (died 1878) June 12 – Harriet Martineau, English social theorist (died 1876) July 10 – Robert Chambers, Scottish writer and publisher (died 1871) July 24 – Alexandre Dumas, père, French novelist (died 1870) July 28 – Winthrop Mackworth Praed, English poet (died 1839) August 14 - Letitia Elizabeth Landon, English poet and novelist (died 1838) August 25 – Nikolaus Lenau, Hungarian-born German poet (died 1850) November 29 – Wilhelm Hauff, German poet and novelist (died 1827) December 8 – Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet (died 1839) December 23 – Sara Coleridge, English poet and translator (died 1852) December 31 – Richard Henry Horne, English poet, critic and journalist, and public official in Australia (died 1884)