page_title: 1854 in literature
section_title: Events
hierarchical_section_title: 1854 in literature / Events
caption_attribution_description: English: Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy 1854
context_section_description: March 2 – An adaptation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice into Bengali, Bhānumatī-chittavilās by Hara Chandra Ghosh, is staged; also, Dinabandhu Mitra introduces Falstaff in Nabin Tapaswini.
  April 1 – August 12 – Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, which he has begun writing on January 3, is serialised in his magazine Household Words. From September 2, it is followed in the magazine by Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, another social novel based in the Lancashire manufacturing district.
  July – Publication begins of Anthony Trollope's novel Barchester Towers (1857).
  November – Crimean War: Future novelist Leo Tolstoy arrives to take part as a defending soldier in the Siege of Sevastopol (1854–55). Off-duty he is reading Thackeray's novels in French translation.
  December 14 – Wilkie Collins's "The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter", published as "The Fourth Poor Traveller" in The Seven Poor Travellers – the Household Words special Christmas number – is the first non-police detective fiction published in Britain.
  Unknown dates
  John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit is the first novel by a Native American in the United States (writing as "Yellow Bird"), although concerning a Mexican immigrant.
  The Polyglotta Africana, an early classification of African languages based on field work under freed slaves in Freetown, Sierra Leone, is published by Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle.
caption: Tolstoy during the Crimean War, c. 1854
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