1871 in literature
overview of literature-related events during the year of 1871
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1871.
Events
January 1 – The children's literary magazine Young Folks begins publication in the United Kingdom as Our Young Folks' Weekly Budget.
January – John Ruskin begins publishing Fors Clavigera, his originally monthly "letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain".
March 18–May 28 – The Paris Commune is influential on the literary figures in the city at the time and far beyond:
Jules Vallès publishes his newspaper Le Cri du Peuple February 22–May 23 (with interruptions).
At the beginning of April, Victor Hugo moves to Brussels to take care of the family of his son Charles Hugo, who has just died, but closely follows events in Paris.
Émile Zola, as a journalist for Le Sémaphore de Marseille, reports the fall of the Commune, and is one of the first reporters to enter the city during Semaine sanglante (Bloody Week, beginning May 21).
October – "Thomas Maitland", i.e. Robert Williams Buchanan, attacks Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of what Buchanan calls the "Fleshly School" of English poetry in The Contemporary Review. On December 16 Rossetti replies in "The Stealthy School of Criticism" in the Athenaeum.
November 25 – First performance of The Bells starring Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre, London, the actor's first great success.
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This entry incorporates text from “1871 in literature” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.