1784 in literature

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Events

• The founding of the Methodist Church by John Wesley
• Gottlieb Jakob Planck becomes professor of theology at Göttingen

New books

• Thomas Astle - The Origin and Progress of Writing
• George Berkeley - Works
• Edmund Burke - Speech on the East India Bill
• Thomas Chatterton - Supplement to the Miscellanies
• James Cook - A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean
• George Bubb Dodington - Diary
• William Godwin - Sketches of History
• Samuel Horsley - Letters from the Archdeacon of St. Albans
• Immanuel Kant - What is Enlightenment?
• William Mitford - The History of Greece
• Antoine de Rivarol - Sur l'universalité de la langue française
• Arthur Young - Annals of Agriculture

Poetry

• Anonymous - Rolliad
• Mary Alcock - The Air Balloon
• Richard Jago - Poems
• Anna Seward - Louisa
• Charlotte Turner Smith - Elegaic Sonnets
• Helen Maria Williams - An Ode on the Peace
  • - Peru

Fiction

• Anonymous - Dangerous Connections (transl. of Les liaisons dangereuses)
• Robert Bage - Barham Downs
• Eliza Bromley - Laura and Augustus: an Authentic Story
• William Combe - Original Love-letters
• William Godwin - Damon and Delia
  • - Italian Letters
• Thomas Holcroft - Tales of the Castle

New drama

• Hannah Cowley
  • A Bold Stroke for a Husband
  • More Ways Than One
• Richard Cumberland
  • The Carmelite
  • The Natural Son
• Thomas Holcroft - The Follies of the Day (translation of Pierre Beaumarchais' Le Mariage de Figaro)
• Elizabeth Inchbald - Mogul Tale
• Friedrich Schiller - Intrigue and Love (Kabale und Liebe)

Births

• January 31 - Bernard Barton, poet
• May 18 - William Tennant, Scottish poet
• November 17 - Julia Nyberg, Swedish poet
• date unknown - Antoine Ó Raifteiri, "last of the wandering bards"
• Leigh Hunt, one of the "Cockney School"

Deaths

• December 13 - Samuel Johnson
• Matthew Pilkington, clergyman, writer, and husband of Laetitia Pilkington
• Denis Diderot

Awards