1722 in literature

Events

• January 27 – Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders is published anonymously in London under its full title: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife, Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.
• March – Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year is published under the initials H. F., purporting to be an eyewitness account of the Great Plague of London in 1665.
• August 24 – Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, is arrested in his deanery and confined in the Tower of London, accused of leading the Jacobite "Atterbury Plot" in support of the pretender to the British throne, James Francis Edward Stuart of the House of Stuart.
• September–October – Voltaire and Jean-Baptiste Rousseau meet and quarrel at Brussels.
• September 23 – Lille Grønnegade Theatre opens in Copenhagen, the first Danish-language theater open to the public. The company consists of immigrant French actors who previously worked in the Danish royal theatre, with Ludvig Holberg as house dramatist. The comedies he writes for them this year include Jean de France.
• October 11 – Ten-year-old Jean-Jacques Rousseau is abandoned by his father, Isaac, who flees Geneva to avoid prosecution.
• November 7 – Sir Richard Steele's "sentimental comedy" The Conscious Lovers opens at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London with an initial run of eighteen consecutive nights.
• December – Defoe's picaresque novel Colonel Jack, sharing many plot elements with Moll Flanders, is published.
• Construction of a new building for the Hof-Bibliothek in Vienna, the modern-day Austrian National Library, begins.
• Edmund Bolton's Hypercritica is published, a century after it was written.
• Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi's Zafar Nama is published in a French translation by François Pétis de la Croix.
• First known Caslon serif typeface designed by William Caslon in England.
• William Wood commences the minting of copper halfpence and farthings under patent for circulation in Ireland which will be the subject of the first of Jonathan Swift's Drapier's Letters.

  New books

Prose

• Penelope Aubin
• *The Life and Amorous Adventures of Lucinda
• *The Noble Slaves
• Phanuel Bacon – The Kite
• Daniel Bellamy – The Cambro-Britannic Engineer
• Thomas Cooke – Marlborough
• Daniel Defoe
• *Moll Flanders
• *A Journal of the Plague Year
• *Colonel Jack
• *Due Preparations for the Plague
• *Religious Courtship
• John Dennis – A Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter
• Johann Georg Gichtel – Theosophia Practica
• William Hamilton – The Life and Heroick Actions of the Renoun'd Sir William Wallace
• Eliza Haywood – The British Recluse
• Hildebrand Jacob – Bedlam
• Allan Ramsay – Fables and Tales
• Jean de la Roque – Voyage en Syrie et au mont Liban
• Sir Charles Sedley – Works
• William Sewel – The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers
• Jonathan Swift – A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General
• Matthew Tindal – A Defence of Our Present Happy Establishment
• Isaac Watts – Death and Heaven
• William Wollaston – The Religion of Nature Delineated
• Antonio de Zamora – Comedias nuevas

  Children

• Samuel Croxall – Fables of Aesop and Others

  Drama

• Henry Carey – Hanging and Marriage
• Ludvig Holberg
• *Jean de France eller Hans Frandsen
• *Jeppe paa Bjerget eller den forvandlede Bonde
• *Mester Gert Westphaler
• *Den Politiske Kandestøber
• *Den Vægelsindede
• Pierre de Marivaux – La Surprise de l'amour
• Ambrose Philips – The Briton
• Archibald Pitcairne – The Assembly, or Scotch Reformation
• Richard Steele – The Conscious Lovers

  Poetry

• Thomas Parnell – Poems on Several Occasions
• Elizabeth Thomas – Miscellany Poems on Several Subjects

  Births

• February 24 – John Burgoyne, English dramatist, army officer and politician
• February 26 – Mary Leapor, English working-class poet
• April – Joseph Warton, English poet and critic
• April 11 – Christopher Smart, English poet
• September 22 – John Home, Scottish dramatist
• October 4 – Dominic Schram or Schramm, German theologian
• Unknown dates
• *John Brown of Haddington, Scottish theologian
• *Waris Shah, Punjabi Muslim poet

  Deaths

• January 23 – Henri de Boulainvilliers, French historian
• March 11 – John Toland, Irish philosopher
• August – Robert Sibbald, Scottish antiquary
• September 11 – Johann Michael Heineccius, German theologian
• September 18 – André Dacier, French scholar
• December 26 – Jan František Beckovský, Czech historian and translator