1792 in literature

Events

• July – Molière's body is exhumed for reburial in the Museum of French Monuments in Paris, having been originally buried in the ground reserved for unbaptised infants, because actors were not allowed to be buried on sacred ground.
• September 29 – The Theatre Royal, Dumfries opens as The Theatre. By the 21st century this will be the oldest working theatre in Scotland.

• Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna set up a newsagent's business in London that will become the bookselling chain WHSmith.

  New books

Fiction

• Hugh Henry Brackenridge – Modern Chivalry: containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O'Regan, his servant
• :de: Johann Baptist Durach |Johann Baptist Durach – Philippine Welserin
• Susannah Gunning – Anecdotes of the Delborough Family
• Charlotte Palmer
• *It Is and It Is Not a Novel
• *Integrity and Content: an Allegory
• Charlotte Turner Smith – Desmond

  Children

• Elizabeth Pinchard – The Blind Child, or, Anecdotes of the Wyndham Family

  Drama

• Pierre Beaumarchais – La Mère coupable
• Joseph Chénier – Caïus Gracchus
• Leandro Fernández de Moratín – La comedia nueva
• Thomas Holcroft – The Road to Ruin

  Poetry

• Samuel Rogers – The Pleasures of Memory, with Other Poems

  Non-fiction

• Saul Ascher – Leviathan oder über Religion in Rücksicht des Judentums
• Yuan Mei – Suiyuan shidan
• Arthur Murphy – An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson
• Maria Riddell – Voyage to the Madeira and Leeward and Caribbean Isles, with Sketches of the Natural History of these Islands
• Gottlob Ernst Schulze – Aenesidemus
• Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

  Births

• February 10 – Frederick Marryat, English novelist and naval officer
• April 5 – John Lavicount Anderdon, English writer
• April 25 – John Keble, English poet
• June 21 – Ferdinand Christian Baur, German theologian
• July 2 – Thomas Phillipps, English book collector
• August 4 – Percy Bysshe Shelley, English poet and radical
• October 17 – Sir John Bowring, English political economist and miscellanist
• October 28 – Anne Knight, English children's writer and educationist
• November 26 – Sarah Grimké, American abolitionist and suffragist
• December 18 – William Howitt, English historical writer and poet

  Deaths

• April 23 – Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, German theologian and writer
• May 4 – Giuseppe Garampi, Italian scholar and book collector
• May 12 – Charles Simon Favart, French dramatist
• May 29 – Thomas Marryat, English medical writer and physician
• June 4
• *John Burgoyne, English dramatist and army officer
• *Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Baltic German dramatist
• August 25 – Jacques Cazotte, French novelist
• September – John Edwards, Welsh poet
• December 7 – Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, French novelist

• Nicholas Adam, French grammarian