This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1818.

• January 1 – Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus first appears anonymously in London.^[1] Its originality is praised by Walter Scott.^[2]
• January 8 – Lord Byron, in Venice, sends the final part of Childe Harold to his publisher.^[3]
• January 11 – Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" appears in Leigh Hunt's weekly The Examiner (London; p. 24) under the pen name "Glirastes". Horace Smith's contribution to the same informal sonnet-writing competition, "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below" is published on February 1 under his initials.
• March 12 – Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary and her stepsister Claire Clairmont leave England for Italy, intending to take Claire's illegitimate child Alba to her father, Lord Byron.^[4]
• April 11 – John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge take a walk on Hampstead Heath. In a letter to his brother George, Keats writes that they talked of "a thousand things... nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, metaphysics."^[5]
• May 11 – The Old Vic is founded as the Royal Coburg Theatre in South London by James King, Daniel Dunn and John Thomas Serres.
• June – Last issue of The Portico: A Repository of Science & Literature is published in Baltimore with John Neal as editor.^[6]
• June–August – Keats with his friend Charles Armitage Brown makes a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the English Lake District. On July 11 while in Scotland he visits Burns Cottage, the birthplace of Robert Burns (1759–1796). Before Keats arrives, he writes to a friend "one of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the cottage of Burns — we need not think of his misery — that is all gone — bad luck to it — I shall look upon it all with unmixed pleasure."^[7] but his encounter with the cottage's alcoholic custodian returns him to thoughts of misery.^[8] On August 2 he climbs to the summit of Ben Nevis, on which he writes a sonnet.^[9]
• July
  • Thomas De Quincey begins 16 months as editor of a new weekly newspaper The Westmorland Gazette, published at Kendal in the English Lake District.
  • The Stephenson Blake type foundry begins operation in Sheffield, England.
• July 18 – Walter Scott's historical novel The Heart of Midlothian appears as Tales of My Landlord, 2nd series, by "Jedediah Cleishbotham", in four volumes. A shipload of copies is sent from John Ballantyne (publisher) in Edinburgh to London.^[10]
• August 28 – The National Library of Iceland is founded as Íslands stiftisbókasafn, at the instigation of a Danish antiquarian, Carl Christian Rafn, and the Icelandic Literary Society.
• September 19 – Lord Byron writes to Thomas Moore that he has completed the first canto of Don Juan, begun on July 3.^[11]
• November – Fanny Brawne first meets John Keats at the home of Charles Armitage Brown.^[12]
• December 17 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge delivers a series of lectures on poetry, drama and philosophy, beginning with Shakespeare's The Tempest.^[13]
• December – Keats is invited to move into Brown's home at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, at this time a pastoral suburb north of London, where he will write much of his most famous work.^[14]

• January 14 – Zachris Topelius, Swedish-language Finnish novelist (died 1898)
• February – Frederick Douglass, African-American abolitionist, author and orator (died 1895)
• April 23 – James Anthony Froude, English religious controversialist and historian (died 1894)
• May 5 – Karl Marx, German philosopher (died 1883)
• May 25 – Jacob Burckhardt, Swiss historian (died 1897)
• July 30 – Emily Brontë, English novelist and poet (died 1848)^[17]
• August 3 – Mary Bell Smith, American educator, social reformer, and writer (died 1894)
• November 9 (October 28 OS) – Ivan Turgenev, Russian novelist and playwright (died 1883)

• January 11 – Johann David Wyss, Swiss children's author writing in German (born 1743)^[18]
• March 6 – John Gifford, English political writer (born 1758)
• May 14 – Matthew Lewis, English novelist and dramatist (born 1775)
• June 11 – Elizabeth Bonhôte, English novelist, essayist and poet (born 1744)^[19]
• October 8 – Radu Golescu, Wallachian statesman and literary sponsor (born 1746)
• October 22 – Joachim Heinrich Campe, German linguist and publisher (born 1746)
• November 6 – Malcolm Laing, Scottish historian (born 1762)
• December 7 – Mary Brunton, Scottish novelist (born 1778)^[20]

• Newdigate Prize – T. H. Ormerod^[21]