1769 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1769.

Events

January 21 – The first of the Letters of Junius criticising the government appears in the Public Advertiser. The identity of Junius remains a mystery, but modern-day scholarly consensus favours Philip Francis.
February–April – John Wilkes is expelled from the Parliament of Great Britain three times.
May – One of 16-year-old Thomas Chatterton's poems attributed to the imaginary medieval monk "Thomas Rowley" – Elinoure and Juga – first appears in Alexander Hamilton's Town and Country Magazine. This year also Chatterton sends specimens of "Rowley"'s poetry and history The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englade to Horace Walpole, who at first offers to print them, but discovering Chatterton's age, rightly considers they may be forgeries and scornfully dismisses him.
September 5–7 – English actor-manager David Garrick stages a Shakespeare Jubilee festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. On October 14 a version opens at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London as The Jubilee.
unknown date
*Jean-François Ducis stages his version of Shakespeare's Hamlet in Paris.
*Jean-Jacques Rousseau completes the Confessions.

William Blackstone – A Reply to Dr. Priestley
Charles Bonnet – Palingénésie philosophique
William Buchan – Domestic Medicine
Edmund Burke – Observations on a Late State of the Nation
Charles Burney – An Essay Towards a History of the Principal Comets that have Appeared Since 1742
William Falconer – An Universal Dictionary of the Marine
Adam Ferguson – Institutes of Moral Philosophy
Junius
*The Political Contest i–ii
*The Letters from Junius to the D***of G*****
Oliver Goldsmith – The Roman History
James Granger – Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution
Johann Gottfried Herder – Kritische Wälder
Elizabeth Montagu – An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear
Nicolas-Edme Rétif – Le Pornographe
Joshua Reynolds – A Discourse
William Robertson – The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V
Laurence Sterne
*A Political Romance
*''Sermons by the Late Rev. Mr. Sterne''