Eighteenth-Century Chronology: 1792

Literature

• January: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• Blake, "Motto to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience" (dated 1792); Charlotte Smith, Desmond; Schiller, On the Ground of Pleasure in the Tragic Object; Coleridge, Greek Sapphic Ode "Ode on the Slave Trade," written during freshman year at Cambridge
• Susanna Rowson, Rebecca
• December: William Wordsworth returns to England
• December: Mary Wollstonecraft leaves for France

Theatre

Art

• William Blake, engravings for Stedman's Narrative, of a five years' expedition, against revolted Negroes of Surinam
• Benjamin West succeeds Sir Joshua Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy

Music

Science, Technology, & Medicine

• William Murdock of Cornwall, England, uses coal gas lighting in his home

Politics & Law

• Mass petition compaign for abolition in Britain
• Boycott of sugar begins
• Denmark decrees gradual abolition by 1803
• Relief Act allows Catholics in Ireland to become lawyers
• Fox's Libel Act requires a jury, not a judge, to determine libel
• 25 January: Shoemaker Thomas Hardy starts the London Corresponding Society
• 11 April: Radical Whigs declare themselves "The Society of the Friends of the People"
• 20 April: France declares war against Austria
• May: Society for Constitutional Information prints as a pamphlet and cheaply distributes Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
• 21 May: George III issues a Royal Proclamation vs. seditious writings, banning The Rights of Man and charging Thomas Paine with sedition
• August: Lafayette, leader of the French National Guard, deserts
• 10 August: Attack on the Tuileries Palace leads to the deposing of Louis XVI and the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly
• 20 August: The Coalition Armies (Austrian, Prussian, and French royalist troops) attack France
• September: The French National Convention abolishes the monarchy and declares the beginning of the new French Republic
• August-September: The Commune of Paris tries to fend off invasion and organize elections
• 2-6 September: Thousands of political prisoners murdered in the "September Massacres"
• 13 September: Thomas Paine flees to France
• 20 September: The French victory at Valmy causes the Coalition army to retreat to the Rhine
• 21 September: Newly elected National Convention abolishes the monarchy and officially declares France a Republic
• 27 September: London Corresponding Society's "Joint Address to the French National Convention"
• 29 October: Louvet denounces Robespierre
• November: France pledges to support other nations that revolt
• 20 November: John Reeves founds the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers as a means of countering Jacobin fervor
• December: First General Convention of Scottish Reformers in Edinburgh
• 1 December: King's Proclamation drawing out the British militia
• 18 December: Thomas Paine is found guilty of sedition for Rights of Man and sentenced to death
• 22 December: The Whigs form the Friends of the Liberty of the Press to defend free speech against Loyalists

Philosophy & Theology

Milestones

• Death of Robert Adam, architect
• Death of Sir Joshua Reynolds
• August: Birth of Percy Shelley
• 15 December: Birth of Caroline Vallon, daugher of William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon

Miscellaneous

• 24 May: Arthur Young, Travels