This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1870.
Events
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Luke Fildes – The Empty Chair (engraving). Fildes, the illustrator for Edwin Drood at the time of Charles Dickens's death, shows Dickens's empty chair in his study at Gads Hill Place. It appears in the Christmas edition of The Graphic and thousands of prints of it are sold.[1]
January 19 – Ivan Turgenev attends and writes about the public execution by guillotine of the spree killer Jean-Baptiste Troppmann outside the gates of La Roquette Prisons in Paris.[2]
March 7 – Thomas Hardy meets his first wife, Emma Gifford, in Cornwall.[3]
March 28 – Serialisation of Kenward Philp's The Bowery Detective in The Fireside Companion (New York) begins, the first known story to include the word detective in the title.
April–September – The serialisation of Charles Dickens' last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is left unfinished on his death on June 9 at Gads Hill Place in Kent, from a stroke, aged 58.[4]
May – Karl May begins a second four-year prison sentence for thefts and frauds, at Waldheim, Saxony.[5]
Spring – Serial publication begins of Aleksis Kivi's only novel Seitsemän veljestä ("Seven Brothers"), the first notable novel in the Finnish language.[6]
August 24/25 – Libraries of the University of Strasbourg and the City of Strasbourg at Temple Neuf are destroyed by fire during the Siege of Strasbourg in the Franco-Prussian War, resulting in the loss of 3,446 medieval manuscripts, including the original 12th-century Hortus deliciarum compiled by Herrad of Landsberg, the Apologist codex containing the only text of the early Epistle to Diognetus, and rare Renaissance books.[7]
September 17 – The first performance of Alexander Pushkin's play Boris Godunov (1825) is given at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg by members of the Alexandrinsky Theatre.
c. September 20 – Friedrich Engels moves permanently to London from Manchester.[8]
December 18 – The Russian literary weekly Niva («Ни́ва», "Cornfield") is first published by Adolf Marks in Saint Petersburg.[9]
unknown date – Construction of the David Sassoon Library in Bombay, India, is completed.[10]
New books
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Fiction
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William Harrison Ainsworth - Talbot Harland
Thomas Bailey Aldrich – The Story of a Bad Boy
Thomas Archer – The Terrible Sights of London
Rhoda Broughton – Red as a Rose is She
Wilkie Collins – Man and Wife
Annie Denton Cridge - Man's Rights; Or, How Would You Like It? Comprising Dreams
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz and Ramalho Ortigão – O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra [pt] (The Mystery of the Sintra Road)
Charles Dickens – The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Benjamin Disraeli – Lothair
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Eternal Husband («Вечный муж», Vechny muzh)
Edward Jenkins – Ginx's Baby: his birth and other misfortunes
Mór Jókai – Fekete gyémántok (Black Diamonds, i. e. coal)
Aleksis Kivi – Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers)
Jonas Lie – Den Fremsynte (The Visionary or Pictures From Nordland)
George Meredith – The Adventures of Harry Richmond (begins serial publication)
^Jeffrey Brooks (2003). When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917. Northwestern University Press. p. 111. ISBN 0-8101-1897-1
^This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Put Yourself in His Place" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
^R. H. Super (1988). The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope. University of Michigan Press. pp. 256–57.
^Sears, Donald A. (1978). John Neal. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers. p. 120. ISBN 080-5-7723-08.