This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1802.
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- April 15 – William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth walk by Ullswater and see a belt of daffodils, which inspires his poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", written two years later.[1]
- April 19 – Joseph Grimaldi first presents his white-faced clown character "Joey", at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London.[2]
- Summer – Adam Oehlenschläger writes at one sitting the poem "Guldhornene", introducing Romanticism into Danish poetry.[3]
- July 31 – William Wordsworth, leaving London for Dover and Calais with Dorothy, witnesses an early morning scene he captures in a Petrarchan sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge". In Calais, he will meet his 9-year-old illegitimate daughter Caroline for the first time.
- October 4 – William Wordsworth marries Mary Hutchinson at Brompton, Scarborough.
- October 10 – The Edinburgh Review, a reforming quarterly, is first published.
- November 13 – The first play in English explicitly called a melodrama ("mélodrame") is performed in London: Thomas Holcroft's Gothic A Tale of Mystery (an unacknowledged translation of de Pixerécourt's Cœlina, ou, l'enfant du mystère), at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.[4]
- November 15 – Washington Irving makes a first appearance in print at the age of nineteen, with observational letters to the New York Morning Chronicle under the name Jonathan Oldstyle.
- December 2–3 – Jane Austen accepts, then rejects, a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither at his Hampshire home.[5]
- unknown dates
- January 9 – Catharine Parr Traill, English-Canadian memoirist and children's author (died 1899)
- February 11 – Lydia Maria Child, American abolitionist, activist, novelist, and journalist (died 1880)
- February 26 – Victor Hugo, French novelist and poet (died 1885)
- June 2 – Karl Lehrs, German classicist (died 1878)
- June 12 – Harriet Martineau, English social theorist (died 1876)
- July 10 – Robert Chambers, Scottish writer and publisher (died 1871)
- July 24 – Alexandre Dumas, père, French novelist (died 1870)
- July 28 – Winthrop Mackworth Praed, English poet (died 1839)
- August 14 - Letitia Elizabeth Landon, English poet and novelist (died 1838)
- August 25 – Nikolaus Lenau, Hungarian-born German poet (died 1850)
- November 29 – Wilhelm Hauff, German poet and novelist (died 1827)
- December 8 – Alexander Odoevsky, Russian poet (died 1839)
- December 23 – Sara Coleridge, English poet and translator (died 1852)
- December 31 – Richard Henry Horne, English poet, critic and journalist, and public official in Australia (died 1884)
Sylvia Bowerbank, "Southcott, Joanna (1750–1814)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004) Retrieved 25 April 2017.