# 1802 in literature

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

* Mary Berry – Fashionable Friends
* James Boaden – The Voice of Nature
* Charles-Guillaume Étienne – Les Deux Mères
* Thomas Morton – Beggar My Neighbour
* Heinrich Joseph von Collin – Coriolan
* Frederick Reynolds – Delays and Blunders
* 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)

## Deaths

* February 26 – Alexander Geddes, Scottish theologian, scholar and priest (born 1737)
* April 18 – Erasmus Darwin, English poet and natural philosopher (born 1731)
* June 5 – Johann Christian Gottlieb Ernesti, German classicist (born 1756)
* June 20 – Sophia Burrell, English poet and dramatist (born 1753)
* June 29 – Johann Jakob Engel, German teacher and writer (born 1741)
* August 10 – Franz Aepinus, German natural philosopher (born 1724)
* December 27 – Thomas Cadell, English bookseller and publisher (born 1742)