# 1766 in literature

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

## Events

* Early – 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.
* May 30 – The Theatre Royal, Bristol, England, opens. Also this year in England, the surviving Georgian Theatre (Stockton-on-Tees) opens as a playhouse.
* July 1 – François-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 – 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 über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur, in which he formulates the literary principles of Sturm und Drang.

## New books
### Fiction

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

### Drama

* George Colman the Elder and David Garrick – The Clandestine Marriage
* Ramón de la Cruz – La pradera de San Isidro
* Thomas Francklin – The Earl of Warrick
* Elizabeth Griffith – The Double Mistake

### Poetry

* Mark Akenside – An Ode to the Late Thomas Edwards
* Christopher Anstey – The New Bath Guide
* James Beattie – Poems
* John Cunningham – Poems
* John Freeth – The Political Songster
* Oliver Goldsmith, ed. – Poems for Young Ladies
* Charles Jenner – Poems
* Henry James Pye – Beauty
* Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg – Gedicht eines Skalden

### Non-fiction

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

## Births

* January 15 – Nathan Drake, English essayist and physician (died 1836)
* February 1 – Eliza Fenwick, English novelist and children's writer (died 1840)
* February 14 – Thomas Robert Malthus, English political scientist (died 1834)
* April 22 – Germaine de Staël (Anne Louise Germaine Necker), French novelist and saloniste (died 1817)
* May 11 – Isaac D'Israeli, English literary scholar (died 1848)
* August 16 – Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, Scottish songwriter and collector (died 1845).
* October 11 – Nólsoyar Páll, Faroese merchant and poet (lost at sea c. 1808)

## Deaths

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