Eighteenth-Century Chronology: 1796

This page in the Eighteenth-Century Chronology is maintained by Jack Lynch. Please send suggestions and corrections to jlynch@andromeda.rutgers.edu.

Literature

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Evenings at Home
24 February: Edmund Burke, "A Letter to a Noble Lord"
Frances Burney, Camilla
Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste
Maria Edgeworth, The Parent's Assistant
Edward Gibbon, Memoirs (a.k.a. Autobiography) (posthumous)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister (Pt. I)
Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney
Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art
Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (Part II) and Agrarian Justice
Charlotte Smith, Marchmont
Madame de Staël, De l'Influence des passions
William Wordsworth, The Borderers. A Tragedy, begun in the autumn
9 January: Samuel Coleridge tours the Midlands to sell The Watchman, giving political talks he calls "sermons"
1 March: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, first issue
16 April: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems on Various Subjects
13 May: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Watchman ceases publication
21 August: William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft become lovers
December: Samuel Taylor Coleridge moves to Nether Stowey

Pitt's "Reign of Terror"
24 February: Edmund Burke, "A Letter to a Noble Lord"
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (Part II) and Agrarian Justice
April: Napoleon leads the French victory over Austria
May: Napoleon enters Milan and establishes the Lombard Republic
Commons narrowly defeats abolition. The Dolben act is not renewed because of oversight. British troops retake slave islands from French.
Napoleon Bonaparte's Italian victories
6 February: John Binns and John Gale Jones, missionary delegates from the London Corresponding Society, are sent to rural reform societies to explain to them how to evade and not challenge the Two Bills
24 February: Edmund Burke, "A Letter to a Noble Lord"
11 March: Binns and Jones are arrested and imprisoned in Birmingham; Francis Place is sent to defend them; they will be tried for violating the Two Acts. Binns is acquitted in August 1800, but Jones convicted April 1799, although never sentenced 1 July: London Corresponding Society's Moral and Political Magazine is published monthly until May 1797