This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1754.
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.
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
Luis José Velázquez – Ensayos, memorias y orígenes de la poesía castellana
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
Thomas Cooke – An Ode on Poetry, Painting, and Sculpture
Thomas Denton – Immortality
John Duncombe – The Feminiad
Henry Jones – The Relief
William Whitehead – Poems
David Garrick – Catharine and Petruchio (adapted from The Taming of the Shrew)
John Gay – The Rehearsal at Goatham
Macnamara 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
March 24 – Joel Barlow, American poet and diplomat (died 1812)
May 23 – William Drennan, Irish physician, poet, 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)
January 28 – Ludvig Holberg, Norwegian philosopher, historian and playwright (born 1684)
April 2 – Thomas Carte, English historian (born 1686)
April 9 – Christian Wolff, German philosopher (born 1679)
October 8 – Henry Fielding English novelist (born 1707)
November 12 – Robert Morris, English architect and writer on architecture (born 1703)
Probable year of death – Francis Coventry, English novelist and cleric (born 1725)
1754 in literature Wikipedia (Text) CC BY-SA