This Year in History:
1816
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
Jane Austen responds to a letter from Rev. James Stanier Clarke, librarian to England’s Prince Regent (the future King George IV), suggesting she write a historic romance, saying, “I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.” Austen’s correspondence with the Prince Regent’s librarian, as well as […]
Charlotte Brontë, the only one of three novelist Brontë sisters to live past age 31, is born. Brontë, one of six siblings who grew up in a gloomy parsonage in the remote English village of Haworth, surrounded by the marshy moors of Yorkshire. Her mother died when she was five, and Charlotte, her two older […]
The first published poem by 20-year-old John Keats appears in The Examiner on May 5, in 1816. Unlike many writers of his day, Keats came from a lower-middle-class background. His father worked at a stable in London and eventually married the owner’s daughter. John was the first of the couple’s five children. John was sent […]
