1804 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1804.

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 4 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge sets sail on The Speedwell for the Mediterranean. In Malta, he obtains employment as Acting Public Secretary at Attard.
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.
unknown dates
*James Mill's pamphlet critical of the corn trade, An Essay on the Impolicy of a Bounty on the Exportation of Grain, is published.
*William Wordsworth writes his best-known poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", describing a scene he witnessed two years earlier.
*German Gerhard Bonnier begins a publishing business in Copenhagen by issuing Underfulde og sandfærdige kriminalhistorier, origin of the Swedish Bonnier Group.

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 –
Anna Maria Porter – ''The Lake of Killarney''

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

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''