May 7 – Percy Bysshe Shelley's verse drama The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts, written and printed in Italy in 1819, is first played privately in England, sponsored by the Shelley Society, at the Grand Theatre, Islington, London, before an audience that includes Robert Browning (for whose birthday it is held), George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde's review of it in Dramatic Review appears on May 15.[2]
September 18 – The "Symbolist Manifesto" (Le Symbolisme) is placed in the French newspaper Le Figaro by a Greek-born poet Jean Moréas, who calls Symbolism hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and intended to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal."
Fall – Clifford Barnes is taken on as a clerk at the Manhattan book store Arthur Hinds & Co., which will become Barnes & Noble.[3]
May 15 – Emily Dickinson dies aged 55 of Bright's disease at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, with fewer than a dozen of her 1,800 poems published. She is buried under the self-penned epitaph "Called Back". After publication of a first collection of her verse in 1890, she will be seen with Walt Whitman as one of the two quintessential nineteenth-century American poets.
unknown dates
A Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare's play Hamlet as Hamuretto Yamato Nishiki-e is serialized in the newspaper Tokyo Eiri Shimbun.[4]
^Turner, Betty N. (2006). The Noble Legacy: The Story of Gilbert Clifford Noble, Cofounder of the Barnes & Noble and Noble & Noble Book Companies. iUniverse. p. 65. ISBN 9780595374786.
^Collins, Paul (2009). The Book of William. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-59691-195-6.
^Benedetti, Jean. (1999). Stanislavski: His Life and Art. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-52520-1.
^"Memoirs of an Arabian Princess: An Autobiography". World Digital Library. 1888. Retrieved 2013-09-19.
^Thornley, Stew (2004). Six Feet Under: A Graveyard Guide to Minnesota. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press. p. 8. ISBN 0-87351-514-5.
^Charles Dudley Warner (2008). A Library of the World's Best Literature - Ancient and Modern - Vol.XLIII. Cosimo, Incorporated. p. 547.
^Verne, Jules (2017). Robur the conqueror. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. p. xii. ISBN 9780819577283.
^Van Gemert, Lia (2011). Women's Writing from the Low Countries 1200-1875: A Bilingual Anthology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. p. 528. ISBN 978-9-08964-129-8.
^Dickinson, Emily (1995). Emily Dickinson's open folios: scenes of reading, surfaces of writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 42. ISBN 9780472105861.