Events The book, Adam Bede by George Eliot, was accused of being the "vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" in Britain and was consequently withdrawn from libraries. New Books Adam Bede - George Eliot Les Amants - Hector Malot Dora Deane - Mary Jane Holmes The Idylls of the King - Alfred Lord Tennyson The Last Athenian - Viktor Rydverg Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin The Ordeal of Richard Feverel - George Meredith Rocambole - Pierre Ponson The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (poetry) - Edward Fitzgerald A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens The World of Ice - RM Ballantyne Births Mary Cholmondeley, British writer (+ 1925) March 8 - Kenneth Grahame (+ 1932) May 22 - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (+ 1930) October 18 - Henri Bergson, French philosopher and winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature December 15 - L. L. Zamenhof, Ruso-Polish initiator of Esperanto Deaths November 28 - Washington Irving, author December 28 - Thomas Macaulay, poet, historian and politician Awards