# 1763 in literature

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

## Events

* January – 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 – A warrant is issued in Britain for the arrest of John Wilkes for seditious writings in The North Briton
* May 16 – James Boswell is introduced to Samuel Johnson at Thomas Davies's bookshop in Covent Garden, London.
* October 11 – The marriage of Henry Thrale and Hester Thrale takes place. Both later become close friends and companions of Dr Samuel Johnson.
* December 6 – 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.
* unknown dates
** Fedor Emin's Nepostoyannaya fortuna, the first Russian novel, is published.
** The atheist English printer John Baskerville produces an edition of The Holy Bible for Cambridge University Press in his Baskerville typeface.
* probable – Chinese Qing dynasty scholar Sun Zhu compiles Three Hundred Tang Poems, an anthology of poems from the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907).

## New books
### Prose

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

### Drama

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

### Poetry

* Richard Bentley the Younger – Patriotism
* Charles Churchill
** The Author
** The Conference
** An Epistle to William Hogarth
** The Prophecy of Famine
** Poems
* John Collier – Tim Bobbin's Toy-shop
* George Keate – The Alps
* Robert Lloyd – The Death of Adam
* James Macpherson (as Ossian) – Temora
* William Mason – Elegies
* James Merrick – Poems
* Giuseppe Parini – Il giorno
* Christopher Smart – A Song to David

### Non-fiction

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

## Births

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

## Deaths

* January 11 – Caspar Abel, German poet and theologian (born 1676)
* February 11 – William Shenstone, English poet (born 1714)
* February 12 – Pierre de Marivaux, French novelist and dramatist (born 1688)
* May 3 – George Psalmanazar, French-born impostor and English writer (born c. 1679)
* June 29 – Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, Swedish poet and salonnière (born 1718)
* September 26 – John Byrom, English poet (born 1692)
* December 23 – Antoine François Prévost (Abbé Prévost), French author (born 1697)
* Probable year of death – Cao Xueqin, Chinese novelist (born c. 1715)