1766 In Literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1766.

Events

*Early – The young Fanny Burney pays one of many visits to Samuel Crisp, a frustrated author and friend of her father living in retirement at Chessington Hall, England.
*May 30 – The Theatre Royal, Bristol, England, opens. Also this year in England, the surviving Georgian Theatre (Stockton-on-Tees) opens as a playhouse.
*July 1 – François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, is tortured and beheaded before his body is burnt on a pyre, with a copy of Voltaire's '' Dictionnaire philosophique'' nailed to his torso, for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville and for other acts of sacrilege, including desecration of a crucifix.
* December 2 – The Law on the Freedom of Printing abolishes censorship in Sweden and guarantees freedom of the press.
*''unknown dates''
**The Drottningholm Palace Theatre is reopened as an opera house in Stockholm, Sweden, in its surviving form, designed by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz.
**Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg begins to publish his ''Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur'', in which he formulates the literary principles of '' Sturm und Drang''.

New books

Fiction

* Henry Brooke – ''The Fool of Quality''
*Oliver Goldsmith – '' The Vicar of Wakefield''
*Catherine Jemmat – ''Miscellanies''
*Charlotte Lennox – ''The History of Eliza''
*Susannah Minifie – ''The Picture''
* Sarah Scott – ''The History of Sir George Ellison''
* Pu Songling (died 1715) – '' Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio'' (聊齋誌異, ''Liaozhai Zhiyi''; first surviving printed edition)
*Christoph Martin Wieland – ''Geschichte des Agathon''
* Anna Williams – ''Miscellanies in Prose and Verse''

Drama

* George Colman the Elder and David Garrick – '' The Clandestine Marriage''
* Ramón de la Cruz – ''La pradera de San Isidro''
* Thomas Francklin – ''The Earl of Warrick''
*Elizabeth Griffith – ''The Double Mistake''

Poetry

* Mark Akenside – ''An Ode to the Late Thomas Edwards''
*Christopher Anstey – ''The New Bath Guide''
* James Beattie – ''Poems''
* John Cunningham – ''Poems''
* John Freeth – ''The Political Songster''
*Oliver Goldsmith, ed. – ''Poems for Young Ladies''
*Charles Jenner – ''Poems''
* Henry James Pye – ''Beauty''
*Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg – ''Gedicht eines Skalden''

Non-fiction

* Francis Blackburne – ''The Confessional'' (theology of confession)
*Edmund Burke – ''A Short Account of a Late Short Administration''
* Denis Diderot – ''Essais sur la peinture''
* James Fordyce – '' Sermons to Young Women''
* Immanuel Kant – ''Dreams of a Spirit-Seer''
*Gotthold Ephraim Lessing – ''Laocoön''
*Franz Mesmer – ''De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum'' (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body)
* Thomas Pennant – ''The British Zoology''
*Pedro Rodríguez Mohedano and Rafael Rodríguez Mohedano – ''Historia literaria de España, desde su primera población hasta nuestros días'' (Literary history of Spain, from the first publication to the present day)
* Samuel Sharp – ''Letters from Italy''
* Tobias Smollett – ''Travels through France and Italy''
* Laurence Sterne – ''The Sermons of Mr Yorick'' vols. iii-iv
* George Stevens (editor) – ''Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare''
* Thomas Tyrwhitt – ''Observations and Conjectures Upon Some Passages of Shakespeare''
*John Wesley – ''A Plain Account of Christian Perfection''

Births

*January 3 – Nguyễn Du, Vietnamese poet (died 1820)
*January 15 – Nathan Drake, English essayist and physician (died 1836)
*February 1 – Eliza Fenwick, English novelist and children's writer (died 1840)
*February 14 – Thomas Robert Malthus, English political scientist (died 1834)
* April 22 – Germaine de Staël (Anne Louise Germaine Necker), French novelist and saloniste (died 1817)
*May 11 – Isaac D'Israeli, English literary scholar (died 1848)
*August 16 – Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, Scottish songwriter and collector (died 1845).
* October 11 – Nólsoyar Páll, Faroese merchant and poet (lost at sea c. 1808)

Deaths

* March 3 – William Rufus Chetwood, Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist and publisher (year of birth unknown)
*March 21 – Richard Dawes, English classicist (born 1708)
* December 12 - Johann Christoph Gottsched, German philosopher (born 1700)

References

{{Year in literature article categories

Years of the 18th century in literature