1763 in literature

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

Events

January â 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 â A warrant is issued in Britain for the arrest of John Wilkes for seditious writings in The North Briton
May 16 â James Boswell is introduced to Samuel Johnson at Thomas Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden, London.
October 11 â The marriage of Henry Thrale and Hester Thrale takes place. Both later become close friends and companions of Dr Samuel Johnson.
December 6 â 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 â Chinese Qing dynasty scholar Sun Zhu compiles Three Hundred Tang Poems, an anthology of poems from the Chinese Tang dynasty (618â907).

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

Isaac Bickerstaffe â Love in a Village (opera)
George Colman the Elder â The Deuce is in Him
NicolÃ¡s Fernandez de MoratÃn â Lucrecia
Samuel Foote
- The Mayor of Garrett
- The Trial of Samuel Foote, Esq. for a Libel on Peter Paragraph
Mary Latter â The Siege of Jerusalem
David Mallet â Elvira
Arthur Murphy â The Citizen
Frances Sheridan
- The Discovery
- The Dupe

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

January 15 â FranÃ§ois-Joseph Talma, French actor (died 1826)
January 29 â Johann Gottfried Seume, German travel writer (died 1810)
March 9 â William Cobbett, English political and economic writer (died 1835)
March 16 â Mary Berry, English dramatist and correspondent (died 1852)
March 21 â Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), German novelist (died 1825)
May 9 â JÃ¡nos BatsÃ¡nyi, Hungarian poet and anti-Habsburg activist (died 1845)
June 15 â Kobayashi Issa, Japanese haiku poet (died 1828)
July 30 â Samuel Rogers, English poet (died 1855)
September 2 â Caroline Schelling (Caroline Michaelis), German literary critic (died 1809)
October 10 â Xavier de Maistre, French soldier and writer (died 1852)
December 6 â Mary Anne Burges, Scottish religious allegorist (died 1813)
Unknown dates
- Huang Peilie, Chinese bibliophile (died 1825)^[3]
- Shen Fu, Chinese chronicler (died c. 1825)

January 11 â Caspar Abel, German poet and theologian (born 1676)
February 11 â William Shenstone, English poet (born 1714)
February 12 â Pierre de Marivaux, French novelist and dramatist (born 1688)^[4]
May 3 â George Psalmanazar, French-born impostor and English writer (born c. 1679)
June 29 â Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, Swedish poet and salonniÃ¨re (born 1718)
September 26 â John Byrom, English poet (born 1692)
Probable year of death â Cao Xueqin, Chinese novelist (born c. 1715)