# 1733 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1733.

## Events

* February 20 – The first epistle of Alexander Pope's poem An Essay on Man is published anonymously.
* March 29 – The second epistle of Pope's An Essay on Man is published.
* May – Voltaire begins his long-term relationship with Emilie de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet.
* May 8 – The third epistle of Pope's An Essay on Man is published.
* Autumn – Laurence Sterne enters Jesus College, Cambridge.
* October – Charles Macklin makes his debut at Drury Lane Theatre in The Recruiting Officer.

## New books
### Prose

* George Berkeley – The Theory of Vision
* James Bramston – The Man of Taste (answer to Pope from 1732)
* John Durant Breval (as Joseph Gay) – Morality in Vice (part of Curll's continuing war with John Gay)
* Peter Browne – Things Supernatural and Divine Conceived by Analogy with things Natural and Human
* George Cheyne – The English Malady
* Thomas-Simon Gueullette – Les Mille et une Heures, contes péruviens (Peruvian Tales: Related in One Thousand and One Hours, by One of the Select Virgins of Cusco)
* John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey – An Epistle from a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity
* George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton – Advice to a Lady
* Samuel Madden – Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (roman à clef about George II)
* David Mallet – Of Verbal Criticism (to Pope)
* Thomas Newcomb – The Woman of Taste (reaction to Pope's Epistle of 1732)
* Alexander Pope
** "Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to" (3) "Society" (continuation of Essay on Man; the first two "epistles" published in 1732, the fourth in 1744)
** Of the Use of Riches: An Epistle to Lord Bathurst (also as Epistle to Bathurst)
** The Impertinent
* Elizabeth Singer Rowe – Letters Moral and Entertaining
* Jonathan Swift
** On Poetry, a Rhapsody (contains explicit attacks on George II and many of the "dunces", resulting in arrests and prosecution.)
** The Life and Genuine Character of Doctor Swift
* Voltaire – Letters Concerning the English Nation
* Isaac Watts – Philosophical Essays

### Drama

* William Bond – The Tuscan Treaty
* John Durant Breval – The Rape of Helen (printed 1737)
* Charles Coffey – The Boarding School (performed and published)
* Henry Fielding – The Miser (from Molière)
* John Gay (died 1732) – Achilles (opera)
* Eliza Haywood – The Opera of Operas (adaptation of Fielding's Tom Thumb, with a pro-Walpole "reconciliation" scene) (opera)
* William Havard – Scanderbeg
* John Kelly – Timon in Love
* Edward Phillips
** The Livery Rake
** The Mock Lawyer
** The Stage Mutineers
* António José da Silva – Vida do Grande Dom Quixote de la Mancha e do Gordo Sancho Pança
* Lewis Theobald (ed.) – The Works of Shakespeare
* Lewis Theobald – The Fatal Secret

### Poetry

* Anonymous – Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (attrib. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to Pope)
* John Banks – Poems on Several Occasions
* Samuel Bowden – Poetical Essays
* Mary Chandler – A Description of Bath
* Thomas Fitzgerald – Poems
* Matthew Green (as Peter Drake) – The Grotto
* James Hammond – An Elegy to a Young Lady
* Alexander Pope –The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace
* See also 1733 in poetry

## Births

* January 12 – Antoine-Marin Lemierre, French poet and dramatist (died 1793)
* March 13 – Joseph Priestley, English natural philosopher and theologian (died 1804)
* March 18 – Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, German critic and bookseller (died 1811)
* August 22 – Jean-François Ducis, French dramatist (died 1816)
* September 5 – Christoph Martin Wieland, German poet (died 1813)
* Unknown date – Robert Lloyd, English poet and satirist (died 1764)

## Deaths

* January 21 – Bernard de Mandeville, Dutch-born satirist and philosopher writing in English (born 1670)
* March 12 – Michel Le Quien, French theologian and historian (born 1661)
* March 13 – Mademoiselle Aïssé, Circassian-born French letter-writer (born c. 1694)
* May 10 – Jacob August Franckenstein, German lexicographer (born 1689)
* June 23 – Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Swiss scholar (born 1672)
* August 16 – Matthew Tindal, English deist writer (born 1657)
* Unknown date – John Dunton, English writer and bookseller (born 1659)