1763 in literature

The following literary events and publications occurred in the year 1763.

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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.^[1]
• unknown dates
  • Fedor Emin's Nepostoyannaya fortuna, the first Russian novel, is published.^[2]
  • 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
  • The Dupe

Poetry

Main article: 1763 in 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)^[3]
  • 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)^[4]
• 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

1. A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, with Notes and Other Illustrations. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown. 1816. pp. 1153–.
2. Charles Moser (30 April 1992). The Cambridge History of Russian Literature. Cambridge University Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-521-42567-4.
3. "Supplement to the Local Gazetteer of Wu Prefecture". World Digital Library. 1134. Retrieved 2013-09-06.
4. Alfred Cismaru (1977). Marivaux and Moliere: A Comparison. Texas Tech University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-89672-055-8.