1799 in literature

Events

• Premières of the second and third parts of Friedrich Schiller's dramatic trilogy Wallenstein are performed at the Weimarer Hoftheater under Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
• *January 30 – Die Piccolomini.
• *April 20 – Wallensteins Tod as Wallenstein.
• April 13 – The father of Charles and Mary Lamb dies; Charles becomes his sister's guardian.
• December 20 – William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy first take up residence at Dove Cottage, Grasmere. William completes the first version of The Prelude during the year.

• A new edition of Edward Young's Night Thoughts is illustrated by Thomas Stothard.
• The Monthly Magazine and American Review starts publication in the United States, edited by Charles Brockden Brown.
• The Religious Tract Society is established as an evangelical publisher in Paternoster Row, London; it continues as The Lutterworth Press into the 21st century.

  New books

Fiction

• Anonymous – Village Orphan
• Charles Brockden Brown
• *Arthur Mervyn
• *Edgar Huntly
• *Ormond
• Thomas Campbell – The Pleasures of Hope
• Elizabeth Gunning – The Gipsey Countess
• Mary Hays – The Victim of Prejudice
• Friedrich Hölderlin – Hyperion, vol. 2
• William Henry Ireland – The Abbess
• Jane West – A Tale of the Times
• Mary Julia Young – The East Indian

  Children

• François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil – Les Cinquante Francs de Jeannette
• Edward Augustus Kendall
• *The Crested Wren. A Tale
• *The Canary Bird. A moral fiction interspersed with poetry
• Dorothy Kilner – Rational Brutes, or Talking Animals

  Drama

• Friedrich von Schiller – Wallensteins Tod

  Poetry

Non-fiction

• Hannah Adams – A Summary History of New-England
• Hannah More – Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education
• Lady Charlotte Murray – The British Garden
• Philip Yorke – The Royal Tribes of Wales

  Births

• February 4 – Thomas Kibble Hervey, Scottish-born poet and critic
• March – Dorothea Tieck, German translator
• March 12 – Mary Howitt, English writer, poet and translator
• March 13 – Maria Dorothea Dunckel, Swedish poet, translator and dramatist
• April 17 – Eliza Acton, English poet and cookery writer
• May 20 – Honoré de Balzac, French novelist
• May 23 – Thomas Hood, English poet
• May 26 – Aleksandr Pushkin, Russian dramatist and poet
• October 9 – Louisa Stuart Costello Irish writer on travel and history
• November 29 – Amos Bronson Alcott, American writer, philosopher, and reformer
• December 30 – John Moultrie, English poet and hymnist

  Deaths

• February 19 – Jean-Charles de Borda, French engineer and memoirist
• February 24 – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German satirist
• April 24 – William Seward, English man of letters
• May 18 – Pierre Beaumarchais, French dramatist
• August 30 – Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, Italian poet and revolutionary

  In literature

• Honoré de Balzac – Les Chouans