January 13 – Friedrich Schiller's first play, the revolutionary melodrama The Robbers (Die Räuber), causes a sensation in Mannheim at its first performance.^[1] Schiller, a military doctor at the time, is arrested for attending the performance without having permission to leave his regiment.^[2]
August 18 – William Blake marries Catherine BoucheratSt Mary's Church, Battersea. In the same year, he meets his future patron, John Flaxman.
October 10 – Sarah Siddons makes a triumphant return to the Drury Lane TheatreinLondon, in the title role of David Garrick's adaptation of Thomas Southerne's Isabella, or, The Fatal Marriage.
unknown dates
- Charles Dibdin becomes joint manager of the Royal Circus, afterwards known as the Surrey Theatre, in London.^[3]
- The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku Quanshu) is completed, the largest literary compilation in China's history. The books are bound in 36,381 volumes with more than 79,000 chapters, containing about 2.3 million pages and 800 million Chinese characters. The bibliography omits some titles, which are included in the Annotated Bibliography of the Four Treasuries the following year.Wilkinson, Endymion (2000). Chinese History: A Manual. Harvard University Asia Center. p. 276. ISBN 9780674002470.

New books

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Vittorio Alfieri – Saul
Hannah Cowley – The Belle's Stratagem
Richard Cumberland – The Walloons
Charles Nicolas Favart – Le Diable boiteux
Denis Fonvizin – The Minor
Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian – Le Bon Ménage
Louis-Sébastien Mercier
- Le Déserteur (first performed)
- La Destruction de la ligue
John O'Keeffe
- The Castle of Andalusia
- Harlequin Teague
- The Lord Mayor's Day

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William Cowper
- The Diverting History of John Gilpin
- Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk
- Poems
John Freeth – Modern Songs
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – "Erlkönig"
William Hayley – An Essay on Epic Poetry in Five Epistles to Mason
William Mason
- An Archaeological Epistle to Jeremiah Milles....
- King Stephen's Watch
Hannah More – Sacred Dramas for Young Persons
Edward Rushton – The Dismember'd Empire (attributed)
John Scott – Poetical Works
Helen Maria Williams – Edwin and Eltruda
John Wolcot as "Peter Pindar" – Lyric Odes, to the Royal Academicians

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Thomas Day – Reflections upon the Present State of England, and the Independence of America
William Gilpin – Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales
Edmond Malone – Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (debunking Chatterton's hoax)^[5]
John Nichols – Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer
Thomas Pennant – The Journey from Chester to London^[6]
Isaac Reed – Biographia Dramatica
Joseph Ritson – Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry (onThomas Warton)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- The Confessions
- Reveries of a Solitary Walker^[7]
J. Hector St. John – Letters from an American Farmer
Louis Claude de Saint-Martin – Tableau naturel des rapports qui existent entre Dieu, l'homme, et l'univers
Ignatius Sancho – Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African
Thomas Spence – The History of Crusonia on Robinson Crusoe's Island
Emanuel Swedenborg – Heaven and Hell (translated by Antoine-Joseph Pernety from Latin into French)
Thomas Tyrwhitt – A Vindication of the Appendix to the Poems, called Rowley's
Joseph Warton – An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope
Thomas Warton – An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley

Births

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January 30 – Ann Taylor, English poet and critic (died 1866)
February – Georg Koës, Danish philologist (died 1811)
March 2 – Isaac Pocock, English dramatist and painter (died 1835)
April 16 – William Jerdan, Scottish journalist (died 1869)
June 9 – Peter Fisher, Canadian historian (died 1848)
September 7 – Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, Scottish novelist (died 1854)
September 19 – Richard Lower, English dialect poet (died 1865)
unknown dates
- Alexander Jamieson, Scottish textbook writer, schoolmaster and rhetorician (died 1850)^[8]
- Grace Kennedy, Scottish novelist (died 1825)
- Benjamin Thorpe, English scholar of Anglo-Saxon (died 1870)

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^ Hammer, Stephanie Barbé (2001). Schiller's Wound: The Theater of Trauma from Crisis to Commodity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. p. 32. ISBN 0814328628.

^ "Brief Biography". Retrieved 2013-08-23.

^ Spadoni, Carl (2002). "Collecting Eighteenth-Century English Novels in the Twenty-First Century". Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 14 (3–4): 797–806. doi:10.1353/ecf.2002.0027. S2CID 162375254. Retrieved 2013-02-12. Article 20.

^ James Edward Tobin (1967). Eighteenth Century English Literature and Its Cultural Background: A Bibliography. Biblo and Tannen. p. 89.

^ Hyland, Paul; Gomez, Olga; Greensides, Francesca (2003). The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader. Psychology Press. p. 117. ISBN 9780415204484. Retrieved 23 March 2019.

^ Otto Erich Deutsch (1 June 1966). Mozart: A Documentary Biography. Stanford University Press. p. 199. ISBN 978-0-8047-0233-1.

^ Robert Roswell Palmer (1961). Catholics & Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France. Cooper Square Publishers. p. 127.