1766 in literature

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

Events

Early â 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.^[1]
May 30 â The Theatre Royal, Bristol, England, opens. Also this year in England, the surviving Georgian Theatre (Stockton-on-Tees) opens as a playhouse.^[2]
July 1 â FranÃ§ois-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 â 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 Ã¼ber MerkwÃ¼rdigkeiten der Litteratur, in which he formulates the literary principles of Sturm und Drang.

Henry Brooke â The Fool of Quality
Oliver Goldsmith â The Vicar of Wakefield
Catherine Jemmat â Miscellanies
Charlotte Lennox â The History of Eliza
Susannah Minifie â The Picture
Sarah Scott â The History of Sir George Ellison
Pu Songling (died 1715) â Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (èé½èªç°, Liaozhai Zhiyi; first surviving printed edition)
Christoph Martin Wieland â Geschichte des Agathon
Anna Williams â Miscellanies in Prose and Verse

Francis Blackburne â The Confessional (theology of confession)
Edmund Burke â A Short Account of a Late Short Administration
Denis Diderot â Essais sur la peinture
James Fordyce â Sermons to Young Women
Immanuel Kant â Dreams of a Spirit-Seer
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing â LaocoÃ¶n
Franz Mesmer â De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body)
Thomas Pennant â The British Zoology
Pedro RodrÃguez Mohedano and Rafael RodrÃguez Mohedano â Historia literaria de EspaÃ±a, desde su primera poblaciÃ³n hasta nuestros dÃas (Literary history of Spain, from the first publication to the present day)
Samuel Sharp â Letters from Italy
Tobias Smollett â Travels through France and Italy
Laurence Sterne â The Sermons of Mr Yorick vols. iii-iv
George Stevens (editor) â Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare
Thomas Tyrwhitt â Observations and Conjectures Upon Some Passages of Shakespeare
John Wesley â A Plain Account of Christian Perfection
Henry Sampson Woodfall â British Liberties, or the Free-born Subject's Inheritance

January 15 â Nathan Drake, English essayist and physician (died 1836)
February 1 â Eliza Fenwick, English novelist and children's writer (died 1840)
February 14 â Thomas Robert Malthus, English political scientist (died 1834)^[4]
April 22 â Germaine de StaÃ«l (Anne Louise Germaine Necker), French novelist and saloniste (died 1817)^[5]
May 11 â Isaac D'Israeli, English literary scholar (died 1848)^[6]
August 16 â Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, Scottish songwriter and collector (died 1845).
October 11 â NÃ³lsoyar PÃ¡ll, Faroese merchant and poet (lost at sea c. 1808)

March 3 â William Rufus Chetwood, Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist and publisher (year of birth unknown)
March 21 â Richard Dawes, English classicist (born 1708)
December 12 - Johann Christoph Gottsched, German philosopher (born 1700)^[7]