1754 in literature

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This is a list of literature-related events in 1754.

Events

• January 28 - Horace Walpole, in a letter to Horace Mann, coins the word serendipity (from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip).
• March 2 - Riot at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. Thomas Sheridan, the manager, resigns, and leaves Ireland on September 15 for London where his wife Frances Sheridan meets Samuel Richardson.
• Élie Catherine Fréron's journal Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps is replaced by his Année littéraire.

New books

• Anonymous - Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela
• Thomas Birch - Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth
• Charles Bonnet - Essai de psychologie
• John Gilbert Cooper - Letters Concerning Taste
• John Douglas -Letter on the Criterion of Miracles
• John Gillies - Historical Collections Relating to Remarkable Period of the Success of the Gospel
• Zachary Grey - Critical, Historical, and Explanatory Notes on Shakespeare
• Benjamin Hoadly - Sixteen Sermons
• David Hume - The History of England (volume 1)
• William Law - The Second Part of the Spirit of Love
• Francis Plumer - A Candid Examination of the History of Sir Charles Grandison
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on Inequality
• Henry St. John - Philosophical Works
• Jonathan Swift - Brotherly Love
  • - The Works of Jonathan Swift (the Hawkesworth edition)
• William Warburton - A View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy
• Thomas Warton - Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser

Fiction

• Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding - The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable
• Mary Davys - The Reformed Coquet; or Memoirs of Amoranda
• Henry Fielding - The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (enlarged and expanded from the Miscellanies of 1743)
• Solomon Gessner - Daphnis
• Sarah Scott:
  • Agreeable Ugliness
  • A Journey Through Every Stage of Life
• John Shebbeare - The Marriage Act

Poetry

• Thomas Cooke - An Ode on Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture
• Thomas Denton - Immortality
• John Duncombe - The Feminiad
• Henry Jones - The Relief
• William Whitehead - Poems

Drama

• John Gay - The Rehearsal at Goatham
• McNamara Morgan:
  • Philoclea (from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia)
  • The Sheep-Shearing, or Florizel and Perdita (a farce adapted from The Winter's Tale)
• Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon - Le Triumvirat

Births

• March 24 – Joel Barlow, American poet and diplomat (died 1812
• May 23 – William Drennan, Irish physician, poet, political radical and educationalist (died 1820)
• July 11 – Thomas Bowdler, English editor (died 1825)
• October 13 – Frances Jacson, English novelist (died 1842)
• December 24 – George Crabbe, English poet (died 1832)

Deaths

• January 28 - Ludvig Holberg, Norwegian essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright (born 1684)
• April 2 - Thomas Carte, historian (born 1686)
• April 9 - Christian Wolff, philosopher (born 1679)
• October 8 - Henry Fielding (born 1707)
• date unknown - Robert Morris, writer on architecture (born 1703)
• probable - Francis Coventry, novelist (born 1725)