Eighteenth-Century Chronology: 1798

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

Literature

Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions, vol. 1
William Blake, Annotations to Bishop Watson's Apology
William Blake begins his annotations of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses
Charles Brockden Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue on the Rights of Women
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation
Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education
29 January: William Godwin, Posthumous Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, including Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman and Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft
Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principles of Population
Susanna Rowson, Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times
Charlotte Smith, The Young Philosopher
13 July: William Wordsworth revisits Tintern Abbey and writes "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"
8 September: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, first edition
6 October: William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Coleridge leave England for Germany

George Canning, The Loves of Triangles, parodies Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden
Baron Cuvier, Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux, the first modern work of comparative anatomy
Aloys Senefelder of Germany develops the techniques for lithography
Henry Cavendish of England calculates the mass of the earth
Benjamin Rumford of America discovers the principles by which friction generates heat

Abbé Barreul, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (translated into English)
February: Napoleon occupies Rome, and begins his campaigns in Egypt and the Middle East
Joseph Johnson and Gilbert Wakefield are imprisoned
Commons rejects abolition
February-October: The Irish Rebellion
11 May: France: The Coup of 22 Floreal, Year VI, vs. jacobins
June: Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population