# 1771 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1771.

## Events

* April 9 – Pedro Correia Garção is arrested and committed to prison by Sebastião de Melo, Marquis of Pombal.
* unknown dates
** Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling inaugurates the fashion for sentimentalism in novels.
** Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim: Von einer Freundin derselben aus Original-Papieren und andern zuverläßigen Quellen gezogen ("History of Lady von Sternheim"), completed at Bönnigheim and published this year in Leipzig edited by the author's cousin Christoph Wieland in 2 volumes, is, within the tradition of German literature, the first significant novel by a woman, the first epistolary novel and the first "sentimental" novel.
** Matthias Claudius begins editing and publishing the newspaper Der Wandsbecker Bothe.
** Slovene literature: The Nouvi Zákon, a translation of the New Testament into the Prekmurje Slovene language by István Küzmics, the Hungarian Slovene writer and evangelical pastor, is published (in Halle).
** Archbishop Richard Robinson founds the Armagh Public Library in the north of Ireland.

## New books
### Fiction

* Sophia Briscoe – Miss Melmoth; or the New Clarissa
* Claude Joseph Dorat – Les Sacrifices de l'amour
* Elizabeth Griffith – The History of Lady Barton
* John Langhorne – Letters to Eleonara
* Henry Mackenzie – The Man of Feeling
* Louis-Sébastien Mercier – L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais
* Tobias Smollett – The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
* Sophie von La Roche – Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim

### Children

* Christopher Smart – Hymns for the Amusement of Children

### Drama

* Isaac Bickerstaffe – He Wou'd If He Cou'd
* José Cadalso – Sancho García
* Richard Cumberland – The West Indian
* Denis Diderot – Le Fils Naturel
* Carlo Goldoni – Le Bourru Bienfaisant
* Samuel Foote – The Maid of Bath
* Hugh Kelly – Clementina
* George Alexander Stevens – The Fair Orphan
* Alexander Sumarokov – Dmitri the Usurper

### Poetry

* James Beattie – The Minstrel
* James Cawthorn – Poems
* John Langhorne – The Fables of Flora
* Thomas Percy – The Hermit of Warkworth
* Henry James Pye – The Triumph of Fashion
* Christoph Martin Wieland – Der neue Amadis

### Non-fiction

* John Brown – Description of the Lake of Keswick
* Charles Burney – The Present State of Music in France and Italy
* John Dalrymple – Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland
* John William Fletcher – Five Checks to Antinomianism
* Oliver Goldsmith – The History of England
* Samuel Johnson – Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands
* Martinez de Pasqually – Traité sur la réintégration des êtres dans leur première propriété, vertu et puissance spirituelle divine (approximate year)
* Thomas Pennant – A Tour in Scotland
* Richard Price – Observations on Reversionary Payments
* William Smellie – Encyclopædia Britannica (in 100 volumes)
* Emanuel Swedenborg – True Christian Religion
* John Wesley – Works
* Arthur Young – The Farmer's Tour Through the East of England
* Real Academia Española – Gramática

## Births

* January 17 – Charles Brockden Brown, American novelist (died 1810)
* February 5 – John Lingard, English historian and Catholic priest (died 1851)
* March 23 – Lumley Skeffington, English playwright and fop (died 1850)
* June 13 – Sydney Smith, English wit and cleric (died 1845)
* August 15 – Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist and poet (died 1832)
* November 4 – James Montgomery, Scottish-born poet and hymnist (died 1854)
* December 25 – Dorothy Wordsworth, English diarist and poet (died 1855)
* December 26 – Heinrich Joseph von Collin, Austrian dramatist (died 1811)

## Deaths

* January 11 – Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, French philosopher (born 1704)
* February 2 – John Lockman, English historian, poet and translator (born 1698)
* March 9 – Henry Pemberton, English man of letters and physician (born 1694)
* May 21 – Christopher Smart, English poet (born 1722)
* July 30 – Thomas Gray, English poet (born 1716)
* September 17 – Tobias Smollett, Scottish novelist, journalist and translator (born 1721)
* October 14 – John Gill, English theologian (born 1697)
* December 26 – Claude Adrien Helvétius, French philosopher (born 1715)
* probable – Luis Galiana y Cervera, Spanish theologian, philologist and writer (born 1740)