1820 in literature

See also: 1819 in literature, other events of 1820, 1821 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• Robert Chambers's publishing company publishes The Songs of Robert Burns.
• November 20 – An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story).

New books

• The Abbot – Sir Walter Scott
• Castle of Nielo – Robert Huish
• The Crusaders – Louisa Stanhope
• Essays of Elia – Charles Lamb
• The Eve of St. Agnes – John Keats
• Forty Years ago – Thomas Gaspey
• The Highland Castle, and the Lowland Cottage – Rosalia St. Clair
• Italian Mysteries – Francis Lathom
• Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
• Lamia and Other Poems – John Keats
• Life of Wesley – Robert Southey
• Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
• The Munster Cottage Boy – Regina Marie Roche
• Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery – John Clare
• Prometheus Unbound (poetry) – Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Ruslan and Ludmila – Alexander Pushkin
• The Songs of Robert Burns – Robert Burns
• The Spectre of Lanmere Abbey – Sarah Wilkinson

Births

• January 17 – Anne Brontë, author (+ 1849)
• March 30 – Anna Sewell, author (+ 1878)
• April 26 – Alice Cary, American poet and short-story writer
• November 28 – Friedrich Engels, socialist writer (+ 1895)

Deaths

Awards