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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

thumb|[[:File:British Liberties, or the Free-born Subject's Inheritance (1st ed, 1766).pdf|British Liberties, or the Free-born Subject's Inheritance, an anonymous 1766 book published by Henry Sampson Woodfall and William Strahan, "Law-Printers to the King's Most Excellent Majesty"]]

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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
  • Henry Sampson Woodfall – British Liberties, or the Free-born Subject's Inheritance

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)

References