1763 In Literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1763.

Events

*January – Christopher Smart's asylum confinement ends at Mr Potter's asylum in London. (He was admitted to St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in May 1757 and may have been confined before that; he was later moved to Potter's.) While confined, Smart has written ''A Song to David'', published this year, and ''Jubilate Agno'', not published until 1939.
*April 30 – A warrant is issued in Britain for the arrest of John Wilkes for seditious writings in ''The North Briton''
*May 16 – James Boswell is introduced to Samuel Johnson at Thomas Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden, London.
*October 11 – The marriage of Henry Thrale and Hester Thrale takes place. Both later become close friends and companions of Dr Samuel Johnson.
*December 6 – John Wilkes brings a court action for trespass against Robert Wood, after the Lord Chief Justice rules that parliamentary privilege protects Wilkes from arrest for libel.
*''unknown dates''
** Fedor Emin's ''Nepostoyannaya fortuna'', the first Russian novel, is published.
**The atheist English printer John Baskerville produces an edition of ''The Holy Bible'' for Cambridge University Press in his Baskerville typeface.
*''probable'' – Chinese Qing dynasty scholar Sun Zhu compiles ''Three Hundred Tang Poems'', an anthology of poems from the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907).

New books

Prose

*Frances Brooke – ''The History of Lady Julia Mandeville''
* James Grieve – English translation of Stepan Krasheninnikov's ''History of Kamtschatka''
* Susannah Minifie and Margaret Minifie – ''The Histories of Lady Frances S—— and Lady Caroline S——''
* John Langhorne – ''The Letters that Passed Between Theodosius and Constantia''
*Cao Xueqin – '' The Chronicles of the Stone''

Drama

*Isaac Bickerstaffe – ''Love in a Village'' (opera)
*George Colman the Elder – ''The Deuce is in Him''
* Nicolás Fernandez de Moratín – ''Lucrecia''
*Samuel Foote
**''The Mayor of Garrett''
**''The Trial of Samuel Foote, Esq. for a Libel on Peter Paragraph''
*Mary Latter – ''The Siege of Jerusalem''
* David Mallet – ''Elvira''
* Arthur Murphy – ''The Citizen''
*Frances Sheridan – ''The Discovery''

Poetry

* Richard Bentley the Younger – ''Patriotism''
* Charles Churchill
**''The Author''
**''The Conference''
**''An Epistle to William Hogarth''
**''The Prophecy of Famine''
**''Poems''
* John Collier – ''Tim Bobbin's Toy-shop''
*George Keate – ''The Alps''
* Robert Lloyd – ''The Death of Adam''
*James Macpherson (as Ossian) – ''Temora''
*William Mason – ''Elegies''
* James Merrick – ''Poems''
*Giuseppe Parini – '' Il giorno''
* Christopher Smart – ''A Song to David''

Non-fiction

*''Almanach de Gotha'' (first issue)
* John Ash – ''Grammatical Institutes''
*Thomas Bayes (died 1761) – ''An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances''
*Hugh Blair – ''A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian''
*John Brown – ''A Dissertation on Poetry and Music''
*Philip Doddridge – ''A Course of Lectures on the Principal Subjects in Pneumatology, Ethics, and Divinity''
*Immanuel Kant – '' The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God''
*Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz – ''History of Louisiana''; an English translation, in two volumes, of ''Histoire de la Louisiane'', published in 1758
*Catharine Macaulay – ''The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line''
*Mary Wortley Montagu – ''Letters''
*Robert Orme – ''A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan from the Year 1745''
*William Williams Pantycelyn – ''Atteb Philo-Evangelius i Martha Philopur'' (Philo-Evangelius's Reply to Martha Philopur)
*Emanuel Swedenborg – ''Doctrine of Holy Scripture''
* Henry Venn – ''The Complete Duty of Man''
*Voltaire – ''Traité sur la tolérance''
*William Warburton – ''The Doctrine of Grace''
*John Wesley – ''A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation''

Births

*January 15 – François-Joseph Talma, French actor (died 1826)
*January 29 – Johann Gottfried Seume, German travel writer (died 1810)
*March 9 – William Cobbett, English political and economic writer (died 1835)
*March 16 – Mary Berry, English dramatist and correspondent (died 1852)
*March 21 – Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), German novelist (died 1825)
*May 9 – János Batsányi, Hungarian poet and anti-Habsburg activist (died 1845)
*June 15 – Kobayashi Issa, Japanese haiku poet (died 1828)
*July 30 – Samuel Rogers, English poet (died 1855)
*September 2 – Caroline Schelling (Caroline Michaelis), German literary critic (died 1809)
*October 10 – Xavier de Maistre, French soldier and writer (died 1852)
*December 6 – Mary Anne Burges, Scottish religious allegorist (died 1813)
*''Unknown dates''
** Huang Peilie, Chinese bibliophile (died 1825)
**Shen Fu, Chinese chronicler (died c. 1825)

Deaths

*January 11 – Caspar Abel, German poet and theologian (born 1676)
*February 11 – William Shenstone, English poet (born 1714)
*February 12 – Pierre de Marivaux, French novelist and dramatist (born 1688)
*May 3 – George Psalmanazar, French-born impostor and English writer (born c. 1679)
*June 29 – Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, Swedish poet and salonnière (born 1718)
*September 26 – John Byrom, English poet (born 1692)
*December 23 – Antoine François Prévost (Abbé Prévost), French author (born 1697)
*''Probable year of death'' – Cao Xueqin, Chinese novelist (born c. 1715)

References

{{Year in literature article categories

Years of the 18th century in literature