The writer Thomas Carlyle was overcome with grief at the news. Actor William Macready noted in his diary: "I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain." Even Daniel O'Connell was traumatised. Learning of the event while travelling by train, the Liberator burst into tears, declared "he should not have killed her", and threw his book out the window.
The "he" was Charles Dickens and the "her" was Little Nell, who had just succumbed to the combined effects of exhaustion and malnutrition, after one of the longest drawn-out deaths in literature.
Unlike other authors who have killed off famous characters before and since, Dickens had no real choice as he approached the denouement of The Old Curiosity Shop. His friend and agent John Forster had argued that Nell's death was the only credible outcome, and Dickens agreed despite feeling "anguish unspeakable" at the prospect. Once his serialised instalments began preparing readers for the worst, however, he was inundated with appeals for clemency.
Although the fictional child had taken on a real life in the eyes of readers, her creator retained full responsibility for her demise. And his verdict was awaited with dread. When a ship arrived in New York carrying copies of the final chapters, crowds waiting on the pier shouted to those on board: "Is Little Nell dead?" More than a century-and-a-half later, similar suspense surrounds the fate of Harry Potter.
We must wait another few hours to find out if, as widely expected, JK Rowling dispatches him permanently in the seventh novel of the series. But it looked bad for the boy wizard when, last month, bookmakers stopped taking money on his demise. Even more ominously, in a TV interview, Rowling spoke of "sobbing my eyes out" while writing the latest volume. And now bookies have even suspended betting on the hero dying by self-sacrifice, after a flood of bets drove the price of such an outcome in from 33-1 to 2-5. His murder by the evil Lord Voldemort is now only second favourite, at 9-4.
Whatever Harry's fate, Rowling did at least have artistically viable alternatives, unlike Dickens. So between the moment when she wrote "the end" and the one in which she handed the manuscript to her publisher, I wonder if she thought of the story of Paul Sheldon, the romantic fiction author in Stephen King's horror classic, Misery.
The book's title refers to Sheldon's very popular heroine, Misery Chastaine, a character he has grown to loathe through seven novels, and whose death he plans in the eighth. Unfortunately, en route to the publishers with the MS, he drives over a cliff.
Even worse, he is then rescued by an unhinged fan of the series, who lovingly nurses him back to health and, just as lovingly, makes him sick again, while forcing him to rewrite the book.
Of course Sheldon is a fictional figure, like his rescuer. But thanks to Kathy Bates's Oscar-winning performance in the film version, the phrase "I'm your Number 1 fan" still has a sinister ring about it. The scene with the sledgehammer and the piece of wood - giving a whole new meaning to the term "writer's block" - lingers long in the memory, even if you're not a real-life novelist planning to kill a well-loved character.
Sometimes, a character is just too strong to kill, as Arthur Conan Doyle discovered. From his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes presented his creator with a dilemma. His adventures were very popular with readers but, in Doyle's opinion, they were also an irritating distraction from the serious writing with which he hoped to make his name.
Only four years after the detective first appeared, the author was already plotting to get rid of him. And during a visit to Switzerland, he discovered where exactly he would do it. The Reichenbach Falls provided the dramatic backdrop for Holmes's presumed plunge to perdition in The Final Problem, and the nearby town of Meiringen still trades on the association.
The plan didn't quite work, however. For a few years, Doyle held firm, despite 20,000 readers cancelling their subscriptions to the magazine in which the Holmes stories appeared. But if he really was intent on literary homicide, the author of such a famous series of detective stories might have been more careful with the forensics.
Instead, he had had Watson removed from the fatal scene on a wild goose errand, returning to find signs of the struggle in which Holmes and Moriarty were presumed to have perished. It left almost as big a loophole as last night's closing episode of The Sopranos. And sure enough, Doyle was forced to reprise his hero, eventually: first in a retrospective role and then - complete with an alibi for his long disappearance - in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
It was one of the paradoxes of his life that, despite creating a character famous for remorseless rationality, Doyle was a fervent believer in the occult. Ironically, this was part of the reason for Holmes's second life. According to the author's official biography, he spent more than £250,000 during his later years on various madcap schemes for contacting the other side. If he ever got there, he must have been a big fan of the Harry Potter series.