# 1785 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1785.

## Events

* January 1
** The Daily Universal Register (later The Times) is first published, in London.
** The Paris theatre company Théâtre des Variétés-Amusantes moves to a temporary new building in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.
* February 2 – Sarah Siddons makes her London debut in her most famous rôle, Lady Macbeth, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
* February – The English heiress Mary Bowes escapes from her husband, Andrew Robinson Stoney, and begins divorce proceedings.
* April 14 – After today's death of the English poet William Whitehead in London, Thomas Warton succeeds him as Poet Laureate of Great Britain, William Mason having refused the post.
* May 22 – Robert Burns' first child, Elizabeth ("Dear-bought Bess"), is born to his mother's servant, Elizabeth Paton.
* June 23 – The Litvak rabbi and writer Aryeh Leib ben Asher Gunzberg dies at Metz in France after a book-case topples on him, according to tradition.
* November 28 – The Marquis de Sade finishes writing The 120 Days of Sodom (Les 120 Journées de Sodome) while imprisoned in the Bastille; it will not be published until 1904.
* unknown date
** Giacomo Casanova is appointed librarian to Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein at the Duchcov Château in Bohemia.
** A new building for the Prussian Royal Library is completed in Berlin.

## New books
### Fiction

* Anna Maria Bennett – Anna
* Elizabeth Blower – Maria
* Denis Diderot, part trans. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Jacques the Fatalist (Jacques der Fatalist und sein Herr)
* Richard Graves – Eugenius
* Karl Philipp Moritz – Anton Reiser (to 1790)

### Children

* Rudolf Erich Raspe, anonymously – Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia

### Drama

* George Colman the Younger – Two to One
* Richard Cumberland – The Natural Son
* Elizabeth Inchbald
** Appearance Is Against Them
** I'll Tell You What
* Leonard MacNally – Fashionable Levities
* Frederick Reynolds – Werter
* Emanuel Schikaneder – Der Fremde

### Poetry

* János Bacsanyi – The Valour of the Magyars
* Samuel Egerton Brydges – Sonnets and other Poems
* Robert Burns – "To a Mouse"
* William Combe – The Royal Dream
* William Cowper – The Task
* George Crabbe – The News-Paper
* William Hayley – A Philosophical, Historical and Moral Essay on Old Maids
* Samuel Johnson – The Poetical Works
* Friedrich Schiller – Ode to Joy (An die Freude)
* Charles Wilkins (translator) – Bhagvat-geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon
* John Wolcot as "Peter Pindar"
** The Lousiad
** Lyric Odes, for the Year 1785
* Ann Yearsley – Poems

### Non-fiction

* Ethan Allen – Reason: the Only Oracle of Man
* James Boswell – The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
* Edmund Burke – Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts
* Francis Grose – A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
* Samuel Johnson – Prayers and Meditations
* Immanuel Kant – Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
* William Paley – The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy
* Clara Reeve – The Progress of Romance
* Thomas Reid – Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
* John Scott – Critical Essays on Some of the Poems of Several English Poets

## Births

* January 4 – Jakob Grimm, German philologist, jurist and mythologist (died 1863)
* January 31 – Magdalena Dobromila Rettigová, Czech cookery writer (died 1845)
* March 3 – Frances Mary Richardson Currer, English heiress and bibliophile (died 1861)
* March 7 – Alessandro Manzoni, Italian poet and novelist (died 1873)
* March 18 – He Changling (賀長齡), Chinese scholar and writer on governance (died 1848)
* March 21 – Henry Kirke White, English poet (died 1806)
* April 4 – Bettina von Arnim, German novelist (died 1859)
* April 7 – Lorenzo Hammarsköld, Swedish poet and author (died 1827)
* May 3 – Vicente López y Planes, Argentine politician and writer (died 1856)
* May 18 – John Wilson (Christopher North), Scottish writer (died 1854)
* August 15 – Thomas De Quincey, English essayist (died 1859)
* October 18 – Thomas Love Peacock, English novelist, poet and East India Company official (died 1866)
* October 30 – Hermann, Fürst von Pückler-Muskau – German travel and gardening writer (died 1871)
* unknown date – Neofit Bozveli, Bulgarian educator and clergyman, early figure in the Bulgarian National Revival (died 1848)

## Deaths

* January 19 – Jonathan Toup, English classicist, critic and cleric (born 1713)
* April 14 – William Whitehead, English poet laureate (born 1715)
* May 4 – János Sajnovics, Hungarian linguist (born 1733)
* August 31 – Pietro Chiari, Italian playwright, novelist and librettist (born 1712)
* September 17 – Antoine Léonard Thomas, French poet and critic (born 1732)
* November 12 – Richard Burn, English legal writer (born 1709)
* November 25 – Richard Glover, English poet and politician (born 1712)
* December 6 – Kitty Clive, English actress and writer of farce (born 1711)
* December 18 – Joseph Allegranza, Milanese historian (born 1715)
* December 29 – Johan Herman Wessel, Norwegian-born Danish poet and satirist (born 1742)
* unknown date – Ali Haider Multani, Punjabi Sufi poet (born 1690)