1749
Goethe Born in Frankfurt
On a late August afternoon in a Frankfurt townhouse on the Hirschgraben, a dead baby was revived by a horrified midwife. Johann Wolfgang Goethe would become a lawyer, a minister, a botanist, a lover, and the supreme German writer, whose last recorded words, more light, might stand as the century's motto.
Halifax Founded
To counter Louisbourg's return to France, the British Board of Trade sent Governor Edward Cornwallis with twenty-five hundred settlers to build a new naval base on Chebucto Bay. They named it for a statesman. The fort would anchor the coming conquest of Acadia and, by extension, of New France itself.
Fielding's Tom Jones
Henry Fielding, a Bow Street magistrate by day, published his six-volume novel about a foundling who wandered from Somerset to London seeking his true origins. It was immediate, vast, comic, and structured like a symphony. Coleridge would later rank its plot with Oedipus Rex and The Alchemist. The English novel had found its Shakespeare.
Buffon's Histoire Naturelle Begins
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, launched his forty-four-volume survey of nature with three volumes describing the earth and the quadrupeds. Elegant, skeptical, quietly heretical about biblical chronology, it would sell in tens of thousands and nearly reach completion at his death. Natural history had found its first great literary stylist.
Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks
To celebrate the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Handel composed an overture for wind band, played in London's Green Park before thousands. A wooden pavilion designed for the fireworks caught fire and burned down. The king loved the music; the architect wept. Handel quietly added strings and sold the piece to concert halls across Europe.