1733 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1733.

Events

 * February 20 – The first epistle of Alexander Pope's poem An Essay on Man is published anonymously.
 * March 29 – The second epistle of Pope's An Essay on Man is published.
 * May – Voltaire begins his long-term relationship with Emilie de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet.
 * May 8 – The third epistle of Pope's An Essay on Man is published.
 * Autumn – Laurence Sterne enters Jesus College, Cambridge.
 * October – Charles Macklin makes his debut at Drury Lane Theatre in The Recruiting Officer.

Prose

 * George Berkeley – The Theory of Vision
 * James Bramston – The Man of Taste (answer to Pope from 1732)
 * John Durant Breval (as Joseph Gay) – Morality in Vice (part of Curll's continuing war with John Gay)
 * Peter Browne – Things Supernatural and Divine Conceived by Analogy with things Natural and Human
 * George Cheyne – The English Malady
 * Thomas-Simon Gueullette – Les Mille et une Heures, contes péruviens (Peruvian Tales: Related in One Thousand and One Hours, by One of the Select Virgins of Cusco)
 * John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey – An Epistle from a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity
 * George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton – Advice to a Lady
 * Samuel Madden – Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (roman à clef about George II)
 * David Mallet – Of Verbal Criticism (to Pope)
 * Thomas Newcomb – The Woman of Taste (reaction to Pope's Epistle of 1732)
 * Alexander Pope
 * "Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to" (3) "Society" (continuation of Essay on Man; the first two "epistles" published in 1732, the fourth in 1744)
 * Of the Use of Riches: An Epistle to Lord Bathurst (also as Epistle to Bathurst)
 * The Impertinent
 * Elizabeth Singer Rowe – Letters Moral and Entertaining
 * Jonathan Swift
 * On Poetry, a Rhapsody (contains explicit attacks on George II and many of the "dunces", resulting in arrests and prosecution.)
 * The Life and Genuine Character of Doctor Swift
 * Voltaire – Letters Concerning the English Nation
 * Isaac Watts – Philosophical Essays

Drama

 * William Bond – The Tuscan Treaty
 * John Durant Breval – The Rape of Helen (printed 1737)
 * Charles Coffey – The Boarding School (performed and published)
 * Henry Fielding – The Miser (from Molière)
 * John Gay (died 1732) – Achilles (opera)
 * Eliza Haywood – The Opera of Operas (adaptation of Fielding's Tom Thumb, with a pro-Walpole "reconciliation" scene) (opera)
 * William Havard – Scanderbeg
 * John Kelly – Timon in Love
 * Edward Phillips
 * The Livery Rake
 * The Mock Lawyer
 * The Stage Mutineers
 * António José da Silva – Vida do Grande Dom Quixote de la Mancha e do Gordo Sancho Pança
 * Lewis Theobald (ed.) – The Works of Shakespeare
 * Lewis Theobald – The Fatal Secret

Poetry

 * Anonymous – Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (attrib. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to Pope)
 * John Banks – Poems on Several Occasions
 * Samuel Bowden – Poetical Essays
 * Mary Chandler – A Description of Bath
 * Thomas Fitzgerald – Poems
 * Matthew Green (as Peter Drake) – The Grotto
 * James Hammond – An Elegy to a Young Lady
 * Alexander Pope –The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace
 * See also 1733 in poetry

Births

 * January 12 – Antoine-Marin Lemierre, French poet and dramatist (died 1793)
 * March 13 – Joseph Priestley, English natural philosopher and theologian (died 1804)
 * March 18 – Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, German critic and bookseller (died 1811)
 * August 22 – Jean-François Ducis, French dramatist (died 1816)
 * September 5 – Christoph Martin Wieland, German poet (died 1813)
 * Unknown date – Robert Lloyd, English poet and satirist (died 1764)

Deaths

 * January 21 – Bernard de Mandeville, Dutch-born satirist and philosopher writing in English (born 1670)
 * March 12 – Michel Le Quien, French theologian and historian (born 1661)
 * March 13 – Mademoiselle Aïssé, Circassian-born French letter-writer (born c. 1694)
 * May 10 – Jacob August Franckenstein, German lexicographer (born 1689)
 * June 23 – Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Swiss scholar (born 1672)
 * August 16 – Matthew Tindal, English deist writer (born 1657)
 * Unknown date – John Dunton, English writer and bookseller (born 1659)