1763 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 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; later he was 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 his 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 - Marriage of Henry Thrale and Hester Thrale, later close friends and companions of Dr Samuel Johnson.
• Fedor Emin writes Nepostoyannaya fortuna, the first Russian novel.
• The atheist English printer John Baskerville produces an edition of The Holy Bible for Cambridge University Press in his Baskerville typeface.
• Approximate date - Chinese Qing dynasty scholar Sun Zhu compiles Three Hundred Tang Poems, an anthology of poems from the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907).

New books

• Anonymous
  • The Peregrinations of Jeremiah Grant
  • The Reign of King George VI, 1900-1925^[1]
• 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

New 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
• Juan José López de Sedano - Jahel
• 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 - An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances (posthumously published)
• Hugh Blair - A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian
• John Brown - A Dissertation on Poetry and Music
• Beatriz Cienfuegos - La pensadora gaditana
• 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
• Juan Cristóbal Romea y Tapia - El escritor sin título, traducido del español al castellano
• 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)^[2]
  • 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)
• 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