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Date
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Event
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Topics
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Details |
1789 |
William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Book of Thel are dated 1789. |
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Details |
1789 |
The rest of Rousseau's Confessions (See first part of the Confessions.) |
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Details |
1789 |
Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlyn and Dunbane. |
*The Gothic |
Details |
1789 |
Charlotte Smith, Ethelinda, or The Recluse of the Lake. |
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Details |
1789 |
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. (It becomes a bestseller, aiding the cause of abolition.) |
*Abolition |
Details |
1789 |
William Lisle Bowles, Fourteen Sonnets, Elegiac and Descriptive. Written During a Tour. |
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Details |
1789 - 1791 |
Erasmus Darwin writes his long poem in heroic couplets titled, The Botanic Garden. The poem's first part, The Loves of the Plants is published first in 1789. Part II, The Economy of Vegetation appears in 1791. Erasmus Darwin is grandfather of Charles Darwin. |
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Details |
1789 - 1799 |
France: The French Revolution, ending with the overthrow of the Directory by Napoleon Bonaparte. |
*France
*French Revolution |
Details |
May 1789 |
Louis XVI attempts limited economic reforms. |
*French Revolution |
Details |
June 17, 1789 |
The Third Estate--representatives of the French people who are neither aristocrats (First Estate) nor clergy (Second Estate)--names itself the National Assembly (the equivalent of the English House of Commons or the U.S. House of Representatives breaking off from the rest of the government and legislating on their own). |
*French Revolution |
Details |
June 20, 1789 |
The oath of the Jeu de Paume (the Tennis Court where the National Assembly is now meeting; they resolve not to adjourn until they have established a constitution for the kingdom). |
*French Revolution |
Details |
June 22, 1789 |
The clergy joins the Third Estate. |
*French Revolution |
Details |
July 14, 1789 |
Fall of the Bastille: A Paris mob storms the Bastille prison; aristocracy begins to emigrate. |
*French Revolution |
Details |
Aug 1789 |
Constituent Assembly (formerly the National Assembly) ratifies The Declaration of the Rights of Man, abolished Feudalism, and drafts a constitution limiting the monarchy. Jacobins, at first the liberal, then increasing radical wing of the assembly, gain power. |
*French Revolution |
Details |
Sept 1789 - Oct 1789 |
William Wordsworth visits Hawkshead probably between mid Sept. and mid Oct.; he probably at this time meets the discharged soldier referred to in The Prelude, 4.400 ff. |
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Details |
Oct 5, 1789 - Oct 6, 1789 |
"October days": Parisian women, unable to get
bread, march to Versailles and bring the royal family back to Paris. |
*French Revolution |
Details |
Nov 1789 |
Land owned by the church is nationalized. |
*French Revolution |
Details |
Nov 4, 1789 |
At the second annual meeting of the London Revolution Society, a radical or reform society celebrating the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, the Rev. Dr. Richard Price gives his sermon, Discourse on the Love of Our Country; the sermon infuriates Edmund Burke. |
*Revolution Controversy in England |
Details |
1790 |
Hannah More, The Slave Trade (a retitled version of the 1788 poem), An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World. |
*Abolition |
Details |
1790 |
Beginning of the Revolution Controversy (the pamphlet war set off by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France). |
*French Revolution |
Details |
1790 |
Select Committee of Commons hears testimony on the slave trade. |
*Abolition |
Details |
1790 |
Death of Adam Smith. |
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Details |
1790 |
Kant, The Critique of Judgement. |
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Details |
1790 |
Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (The poem was dated by Blake 1790, but until recently various critics have believed that he did not finish etching the plates for this work until 1792 or alternately 1793; recent evidence confirms the 1790 date.) |
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Details |
1790 |
Helen Maria Williams, Julia: a Novel, "Sonnet to Hope," and Letters from France. |
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