1839 in the United Kingdom

1839 in the United Kingdom:

Other years

1837 | 1838 | 1839 | 1840 | 1841

Sport

1839 English cricket season

Events from the year 1839 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch — Victoria
• Prime Minister — The Viscount Melbourne (Whig)

Events

• January — The first parallax measurement of the distance to Alpha Centauri is published by Thomas Henderson.^[1]
• 19 January — British East India Company captures Aden.
• 25 January — H. Fox Talbot shows his "photogenic drawings" at the Royal Institution in London. Sara Anne Bright is also producing such photographic reproductions this year.^[2]
• 29 January — Naturalist Charles Darwin marries his cousin Emma Wedgwood at Maer, Staffordshire.
• February — Report on the Affairs of British North America published.
• 26 February — First nationally recognised Grand National run, at Aintree. It is won by Jem Mason riding Lottery.^[3][4][5][6]
• 26 March — The first Henley Royal Regatta is held on the River Thames.^[7]
• 9 April — The world's first commercial electric telegraph line comes into operation alongside the Great Western Railway line from London Paddington station to West Drayton.
• 19 April — The Treaty of London establishes Belgium as a kingdom with its independence and neutrality guaranteed by Britain and the other great powers of Europe.
• May
  • J. M. W. Turner completes his painting The Fighting Temeraire.^[8]
  • Cambridge Camden Society established by John Mason Neale, Alexander Beresford Hope and Benjamin Webb to promote Gothic architecture.^[9]
• 1 May — Start of Eyre's expeditions to the interior of South Australia.
• 7–11 May — Bedchamber Crisis: Robert Peel asks that Queen Victoria dismiss her Ladies of the Bedchamber as a condition for his forming a government. Victoria refuses to accept the condition, and Melbourne is persuaded to stay on as Prime Minister.^[10]
• 13 May — First Rebecca Riots targeted against Welsh turnpikes, at Efailwen in Carmarthenshire.^[10]
• 31 May — Important British constitutional case of Stockdale v Hansard is launched when publisher John Joseph Stockdale sues for libel after John Roberton's pseudo-medical work On Diseases of the Generative System (1811) is declared in a parliamentary report to be indecent.^[11]
• 3 June — Destruction of opium at Humen begins, casus belli for Britain to open the 3-year First Opium War against Qing dynasty China.
• 4 July — Chartists riot in Birmingham.^[10]
• 15 July — First clipper ship launched in Britain, the schooner Scottish Maid at Alexander Hall's yard in Aberdeen.^[12]
• 23 July — British forces under Sir John Keane capture the fortress city of Ghazni, Afghanistan in the Battle of Ghazni during the First Anglo-Afghan War.^[13]
• 23 August — British forces seize Hong Kong as a base, as it prepares to wage the First Opium War.^[7]
• 30 August — The Eglinton Tournament, a recreation of a medieval tourney, takes place at Eglinton Castle, North Ayrshire, Scotland.
• 5 October — James Clark Ross sets out on the Antarctic expedition of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror which will chart much of the coastline of the continent.
• 19 October — George Bradshaw publishes the first national railway timetable, Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables and Assistant to Railway Travelling, in Manchester.
• 4 November — Newport Rising: several thousand coal miners march on Newport, Monmouthshire, to liberate Chartist prisoners; 24 killed.^[14]
• November — Launch of the first British ocean-going iron warship, Nemesis for the East India Company, by William Laird at Birkenhead.
• 5 December — Uniform Fourpenny Post introduced, a major postal reform, whereby 4d is levied for pre-paid letters up to half an ounce in weight instead of postage being calculated by distance and number of sheets of paper.^[15]
• 24 December — An enormous landslide occurs at Axmouth, Devon. A report by geologists William Daniel Conybeare and William Buckland is one of the earliest scientific descriptions of such an event.^[16]

Undated

• New Committee of Council on education sets up a national system of Inspectors of Schools.^[17]
• County Police Act enables the appointment of police in rural areas^[18] and City of London Police Act confirms establishment of a force in the City.
• Custody of Infants Act (based largely on campaigning by Caroline Norton) permits limited rights of custody of young children to divorced mothers.
• Sisters of Mercy establish the first Roman Catholic convent in England since the Reformation, at Bermondsey in London.^[19]
• Michael Faraday publishes Experimental Researches in Electricity^[20] clarifying the true nature of electricity.
• Claimed invention of the rear-wheel driven bicycle by Kirkpatrick Macmillan in Scotland.^[21]

Publications

• Philip James Bailey's (anonymous) poem Festus.^[22]
• Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N., from 1832 to 1839.
• Mrs William Ellis's conduct book The Women of England: their social duties and domestic habits.

Births

• 7 January — Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé), novelist (died 1908)
• 16 March — John Butler Yeats, Irish artist (died 1922)
• 17 June — Arthur Tooth, Anglican clergyman prosecuted for Ritualist practices in the 1870s (died 1931)
• 19 September — George Cadbury, businessman (died 1922)
• 22 December — John Nevil Maskelyne, stage magician (died 1917)

Deaths

• 16 January — Edmund Lodge, writer (born 1756)
• 28 January — William Beechey, portrait-painter (born 1753)
• 11 April — John Galt, novelist (born 1779)
• 17 May — Archibald Alison, author (born 1757)
• 24 December — James Smith, author (born 1775)

References