January – Maria Edgeworth's first extended work of fiction, Castle Rackrent ("an Hibernian Tale: Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires, Before the Year 1782"), is published anonymously in London, variously regarded as the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first Anglo-Irish novel, the first Big House novel, the first saga novel and the first with an unreliable narrator.[1]
January 10 – The Serampore Mission and Press is established in Serampore (now part of West Bengal) India by Baptist missionaries Joshua Marshman and William Ward. The press will grow into the largest in Asia, printing books in nearly every Indian language.[2]
March – English "ploughboy poet" Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy is published with engravings by Thomas Bewick, selling over 25,000 copies in the next two years, with 15 editions by 1827 and a number of translations.[3][4]
William Blake begins three years' residence in a cottage at Felpham in Sussex to illustrate the works of William Hayley; here he begins work on his poem Milton.
^Kirkpatrick, Kathryn J. (1995). "Introduction to Castle Rackrent". Oxford University Press.
^Das, Sisir Kumar (2006). "A Chronology of Literary Events, 1800–1910". In A History of Indian Literature: Western Impact, Indian Response, 1800–1910. Sahitya Akademi, 2006. Retrieved via Google Books, July 16, 2009.
^Sutherland, John; Fender, Stephen (2011). "3 October". Love, Sex, Death & Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature. London: Icon. pp. 375–6. ISBN978-184831-247-0.