July 31 – Scottish poet Robert Burns' Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect is published by John Wilson in Kilmarnock in 612 copies (the text having been submitted to him on July 13). The volume proves so popular that Burns abandons his plans to emigrate to Jamaica on September 1 for a post as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation and on November 27–28 journeys on a borrowed pony from Mossgiel Farm for his first visit to Edinburgh. Two weeks later he extemporises his "Address to a Haggis", which is first published on December 20 in the Caledonian Mercury.[2]
Thomas Clarkson – An Essay of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (translation of a 1784 Latin essay competition entry)
John Gilchrist – A Dictionary English and Hindoostanee. To which Is Prefixed a Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language (begins publication)
William Herschel – Catalogue of One Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars[12]
^Breitholtz, Lennart (1954). Studier i operan Gustaf Wasa: Études sur la genèse de l'opéra Gustaf Wasa. Uppsala universitets årsskrift (0372-4654), 1954:5 (in French). Uppsala: Lundequistska bokh.
^Grenby, M.O. "'A Conservative Woman Doing Radical Things': Sarah Trimmer and The Guardian of Education." Culturing the Child, 1690–1914, ed. Donelle Ruwe. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. ISBN0-8108-5182-2, "Introduction", viii.