1804 in literature

Events

• March 17 – The first performance of Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell takes place at Weimar under the direction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
• April 15 – John Keats' father, a stable worker, dies of a fractured skull, after falling from his horse while returning from visiting John at school.
• May – Samuel Taylor Coleridge travels to Attard in Malta, where he obtains employment as Acting Public Secretary.

• James Mill publishes An Essay on the Impolicy of a Bounty on the Exportation of Grain, a pamphlet critical of the corn trade.
• William Wordsworth writes the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud".
• German Gerhard Bonnier begins a publishing business in Copenhagen by issuing Underfulde og sandfærdige kriminalhistorier, origin of the Swedish Bonnier Group.

  New books

Fiction

• Mir Amman – Bagh o Buhar, a Translation into the Hindoostanee Tongue of the Celebrated Persian Tale "Qissui Chuhar Durwesh" "by Meer Ummun"
• Sophie Ristaud Cottin – Malvina
• Rachel Hunter -The Unexpected Legacy
• William Henry Ireland – The Sepulchral Summons
• Mary Meeke
• *Amazement
• *The Nine Days' Wonder
• Amelia Opie – Adeline Mowbray
• Ōta Nanpo and others – Shokusanjin ennyo meisekishu
• Anna Maria Porter – The Lake of Killarney

  Children

• François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil
• *Elmonde, ou la Fille de l'hospice
• *Jules, ou le Toit paternel
• Maria Edgeworth – Popular Tales
• Eliza Fenwick – Mary and Her Cat
• Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor – Original Poems for Infant Minds by several young persons, Vol. 1

  Drama

• Friedrich von Schiller – Wilhelm Tell
• Friedrich Hölderlin – translations of the dramas of Sophocles

  Poetry

• William Blake –
• William Lisle Bowles – The Spirit of Discovery
• Kirsha Danilov – The Ancient Russian Poems

  Non-fiction

• Thomas Brown – Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect
• John Wilson Croker – Familiar Epistles to J. F. Jones, Esquire, on the State of the Irish Stage
• Jakob Friedrich Fries – System der Philosophie als evidente Wissenschaft
• Jacques Labillardière – Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen
• James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale – Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth

  Births

• July 1 – George Sand, French novelist and memoirist
• July 4 – Nathaniel Hawthorne, American novelist
• September 8 – Eduard Mörike, German poet
• November 6 – Benjamin Hall Kennedy, English classicist
• December 10 – Eugène Sue, French novelist
• December 21 – Benjamin Disraeli, English novelist and prime minister

  Deaths

• January 4 – Charlotte Lennox, English novelist and playwright
• January 11 – James Tytler, Scottish American editor of Encyclopædia Britannica
• February 6 – Joseph Priestley, English natural philosopher and theologian
• February 12 – Immanuel Kant, German philosopher
• February 19 – Philip Yorke, Welsh antiquary and genealogist
• April 3 – Jędrzej Kitowicz, Polish historian and diarist
• April 27 – Jonathan Boucher, English philologist
• May 3 – Celestyn Czaplic, Polish poet and politician
• August 9 – Robert Potter, English translator, poet and cleric
• August 13 – Anica Bošković, Ragusan writer
• November 5 – Betje Wolff, Dutch novelist
• November 23 – Richard Graves, English poet and novelist
• December 9 – Wilhelm Abraham Teller, German theologian
• December – John Boydell, English Shakespeare illustrator and engraver

• Samuel Ayscough, English librarian and indexer
• Jean-Louis de Lolme, Swiss political theorist