1794 - Literature

Literature

Nonfiction: The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology by Thomas Paine is published in the first of its three parts. Paine was imprisoned for opposing the Reign of Terror, he dares to suggest that humans invented religion rather than being the creations of a divine force, his work is clearly an attack on organized religion, it alienates his friends both in Europe and America, but it strikes a responsive chord with many thinking persons on both sides of the Atlantic; Foundation of the Whole Theory of Science (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre) by Johann Gottlieb Fichte departs from Kantian transcendentalism by replacing God with an Absolute Mind (Ur-Ich) or Primeval Self. Man cannot achieve true freedom without a rational legal system, Fichte says (see Kant, 1781).

Historian Edward Gibbon dies in a house in St. James's Street January 16 at age 56 while on a visit to London, having become so overweight that his obesity has damaged his health, although the proximate cause of his death is septicemia following surgery for gout, which has moved from his foot to one of his testicles, causing it to swell to the size of a melon.

Fiction: Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams by William Godwin; The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe.

Poetry: "Scots Wha Hae" by Robert Burns is published May 8 in the Morning Chronicle: "Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,/ Scots, wham Bruce has often led,/ Welcome to your gory bed,/ Or to victorie."

Songs of Experience by William Blake indicates the poet's disillusion with France and describes in starkly simple terms the shattering of innocence by man and society: "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/ In the forests of the night,/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

Poet André Marie de Chénier protests against the extremism of the revolution, is imprisoned in March on orders from Robespierre, and is guillotined at Paris July 25 at age 31. His bucolics, elegies, epistles, hymns, and odes, many of them written in prison, will not be published until 1819.