1769 in literature

Events

• January 21 – The first of the Letters of Junius criticising the government appears in the Public Advertiser. The identity of Junius remains a mystery, but today's scholarly consensus favours Philip Francis.
• February – April – John Wilkes is expelled from the Parliament of Great Britain three times.
• May – One of 16-year-old Thomas Chatterton's poems attributed to the imaginary medieval monk "Thomas Rowley" – Elinoure and Juga – first appears in Alexander Hamilton's Town and Country Magazine. This year also Chatterton sends specimens of "Rowley"'s poetry and history The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englade to Horace Walpole, who at first offers to print them, but discovering Chatterton's age, rightly considers they may be forgeries and scornfully dismisses him.
• September 5 – 7 – English actor-manager David Garrick stages a Shakespeare Jubilee festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. On October 14 a version opens at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London as The Jubilee.

• Jean-François Ducis stages Shakespeare's Hamlet in Paris.

  New books

Fiction

• Elizabeth Bonhôte – Hortensia, or, The Distressed Wife
• Frances Brooke – The History of Emily Montague
• Elizabeth Griffith – The Delicate Distress
• Charles Jenner – The Placid Man
• Susannah Minifie – The Cottage
• Nicolas-Edme Rétif – Le Pied de Fanchette
• Tobias Smollett – The History and Adventures of an Atom
• William Tooke – The Loves of Othniel and Achsah

  Poetry

• Basílio da Gama – O Uraguai
• Thomas Gray – Ode Performed in the Senate-House at Cambridge
• Clara Reeve – Poems

  Drama

• Mary Bowes, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne – The Siege of Jerusalem
• Richard Cumberland – The Brothers
• Ramón de la Cruz – El Manolo
• Alexander Dow – Zingis
• Jean-François Ducis – Hamlet
• David Garrick – The Jubilee
• Elizabeth Griffith – The School for Rakes
• John Home – The Fatal Discovery
• Charlotte Lennox – The Sister

  Non-fiction

• William Blackstone – A Reply to Dr. Priestley
• Charles Bonnet – Palingénésie philosophique
• William Buchan – Domestic Medicine
• Edmund Burke – Observations on a Late State of the Nation
• Charles Burney – An Essay Towards a History of the Principal Comets that have Appeared Since 1742
• William Falconer – An Universal Dictionary of the Marine
• Adam Ferguson – Institutes of Moral Philosophy
• Junius
• *The Political Contest i–ii
• *The Letters from Junius to the D***of G*****
• Oliver Goldsmith – The Roman History
• James Granger – Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution
• Johann Gottfried Herder – Kritische Wälder
• Elizabeth Montagu – An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear
• Joshua Reynolds – A Discourse
• William Robertson – The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V
• Laurence Sterne
• *A Political Romance
• *Sermons by the Late Rev. Mr. Sterne

  Births

• January 1 – Jane Marcet, née Haldimand, English science writer
• February 9 – Susette Borkenstein Gontard, German lover of poet Friedrich Hölderlin
• March 7 – Richmal Mangnall, English schoolbook writer
• May 21 – John Hookham Frere, English diplomat and author
• September 9 – Ivan Kotliarevsky, Ukrainian writer
• September 14 – Alexander von Humboldt, German explorer, natural philosopher and educator
• November 12 – Amelia Opie, English novelist
• December 7 – Ann Batten Cristall, English poet
• December 26 – Ernst Moritz Arndt, German patriotic author and poet

  Deaths

• January 5 – James Merrick, English poet and scholar
• February 26 – William Duncombe, English dramatist and author
• March 28 – Samuel Derrick, British hack writer
• July – Goronwy Owen, Welsh-language poet
• October 25 – Owen Ruffhead, English miscellanist and editor
• December 13 – Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, German poet
• December 16 – Lady Elizabeth Germain, English philanthropist, correspondent of Jonathan Swift