1757 in literature

Events

• May 3 – The Irish-born actress Peg Woffington, playing Rosalind in As You Like It, suffers a stroke on stage at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in London and never acts again.
• May 6 – The poet Christopher Smart is confined to St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics in London.
• May – The Baskerville typeface, designed by John Baskerville of Birmingham, England, is first used in a wove paper quarto edition of Virgil.
• December 11 – On the death of Colley Cibber as Poet Laureate of Great Britain, the post is declined by Thomas Gray and passes to William Whitehead.
• Angelo Maria Bandini is appointed librarian of the Laurentian Library in Florence.
• Pierre-Augustin Caron changes his name to Beaumarchais.
• Jonathan Edwards becomes President of the institution that will become Princeton University.
• Robert Raikes becomes proprietor of the Gloucester Journal.
• Horace Walpole begins the Strawberry Hill Press.
• Thomas Warton is appointed Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
• The Parlement of Toulouse stages a public burning of Jesuit author Hermann Busenbaum's Medulla Theologiae Morales because of its treatment of the subject of regicide.

  New books

Prose

• John Brown – An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times
• Edmund Burke – A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
• John Dalrymple – An Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property in Great Britain
• Samuel Derrick – Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies
• Adam Ferguson – The Morality of Stage-Plays Seriously Considered
• Sarah Fielding – The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia
• Edward and Elizabeth Griffith – A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances vols. i – ii.
• David Hume – The Natural History of Religion
• Soame Jenyns – A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil
• Richard Price – Review of the Principal Questions in Morals
• Madame Riccoboni – Lettres de Mistriss Fanny Butlerd.
• Tobias Smollett – A Complete History of England
• Horace Walpole – A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his Friend Lien Chi at Peking
• William Warburton – Remarks upon Mr. David Hume's Essay on the Natural History of Religion
• Joseph Warton – Essay on Pope
• John Wesley – The Doctrine of Original Sin

  Drama

• Anonymous – The Taxes
• Phanuel Bacon – Humorous Ethics, or an Attempt to Cure the Vices and Follies of the Age by a Method Entirely New
• Denis Diderot – Le Fils naturel
• Samuel Foote – The Author
• David Garrick – Lilliput
• John Home – Douglas
• Tobias Smollett – The Reprisal

  Poetry

• Robert Andrews – Eidyllia
• Cornelius Arnold – Poems
• Samuel Boyce – Poems
• John Gilbert Cooper as "Aristippus" – Epistles to the Great
• John Duncombe – The Feminead
• William Duncombe – The Works of Horace in English Verse.
• John Dyer – The Fleece
• Carlo Gozzi – La tartana degli influssi per l'anno 1756
• Thomas Gray – Odes
• William Thompson – Poems
• William Wilkie – Epigoniad
• Edward Young – The Works of the Author of Night Thoughts

  Births

• February 1 – John Philip Kemble, English actor
• February 6 – Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Polish poet and dramatist
• April 9 – Wojciech Bogusławski, Polish actor, director and dramatist
• July 21 – Basilius von Ramdohr, German journalist and critic
• November 9 – William Sotheby, English poet and translator
• November 13 – Archibald Alison, Scottish essayist and cleric
• November 18 – William Blake, English poet and artist
• November 27 – Mary Robinson, English poet, actress and royal mistress
• December 4 – Charles Burney, English classicist and book thief
• Unknown date – Giovanni Antonio Galignani, Italian publisher

  Deaths

• January 9 – Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, French dramatist and author
• January 19 – Thomas Ruddiman, Scottish classical scholar, editor, printer and librarian
• March 1 – Edward Moore, English dramatist
• March 8 – Thomas Blackwell, Scottish classical scholar
• August 28 – David Hartley, English philosopher and psychologist
• December 11
• *Colley Cibber, English dramatist, actor-manager and Poet Laureate of Great Britain
• *Edmund Curll, English bookseller and publisher
• December 15 '' – John Dyer, a Welsh poet, painter and Anglican cleric

  In literature

• John Dickson Carr – The Demoniacs
• James Fenimore Cooper – The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757