UK-related events during the year of 1839
Events from the year 1839 in the United Kingdom .
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]
1 March – Sussex County Cricket Club , England's oldest county club, is formed.
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
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.
28 June – coal mine explosion at St Hilda pit, South Shields , kills 51.[ 12]
July – first Royal Show (agricultural show ) held, in Oxford.
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 .[ 13]
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 .[ 14]
17 August – Custody of Infants Act (based largely on campaigning by Caroline Norton ) permits limited rights of custody of young children to divorced mothers.
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 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 : between 5,000 and 10,000 Chartist sympathisers led by John Frost , many of them coal miners, march on Newport, Monmouthshire , to liberate Chartist prisoners; around 22 are killed when troops, directed by Thomas Phillips , the mayor, fire on the crowd.[ 15] This is the last large-scale armed civil rebellion against authority in mainland Britain and sees the most deaths.
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.[ 16]
24 December – an enormous landslide occurs at Axmouth in Devon , creating the Axmouth to Lyme Regis Undercliff . A report by geologists William Daniel Conybeare and William Buckland is one of the earliest scientific descriptions of such an event.[ 17]
December – New Committee of Council on education sets up a national system of Inspectors of Schools for grant-aided establishments.[ 18]
16 January – Edmund Lodge , writer (born 1756)
28 January – Sir William Beechey , portrait painter (born 1753)
11 April – John Galt , novelist (born 1779)
22 April – Thomas Haynes Bayly , poet (died 1839)
17 May – Archibald Alison , author (born 1757)
15 July – Winthrop Mackworth Praed , politician and poet (born 1802)
28 August – William Smith , geologist (born 1769)
24 October – Sir William Charles Ellis , physician specialising in mental illness (born 1780)
15 November – William Murdoch , inventor (born 1754)
24 December – James Smith , author (born 1775)
^ Gavine, David (2004). "Henderson, Thomas (1798–1844)" . Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi :10.1093/ref:odnb/12915 . Retrieved 16 February 2011 . (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
^ Clark, Nick (6 July 2015). "The leaf storm". i . No. 1438. London. p. 27.
^ Penguin Pocket On This Day . Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0 .
^ "Grand National History 1839–1836" . The-grand-national.co.uk. Archived from the original on 21 February 2011. Retrieved 11 March 2011 .
^ "Facts & Figures" . Grandnational.org.uk. Retrieved 11 March 2011 .
^ Haywood, Linda (4 April 2008). "A Big Long History of the Grand National" . Popular Nostalgia . Archived from the original on 6 October 2014. Retrieved 11 March 2011 .
^ a b "Icons, a portrait of England 1820–1840" . Archived from the original on 12 March 2006. Retrieved 2 December 2015 .
^ "National Gallery information" . Archived from the original on 8 August 2007. Retrieved 29 June 2010 .
^ "History of the Society" . Ecclesiological Society. Archived from the original on 26 July 2011. Retrieved 4 May 2011 .
^ a b c Palmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History . London: Century Ltd. pp. 263–264. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2 .
^ Loveland, Ian (2000). Political Libels: A Comparative Study . Oxford: Hart Publishing. pp. 21–22. ISBN 1-84113-115-6 .
^ "St. Hilda" . Durham Mining Museum. Retrieved 22 May 2021 .
^ "Scottish Maid " . Scottish Built Ships . Aberdeen City Council. Retrieved 25 April 2014 .
^ "National Army Museum : Exhibitions : Afghanistan" . Archived from the original on 24 October 2007. Retrieved 12 September 2007 .
^ "John Lovell and the People's Charter" . The struggle for democracy . Kew: The National Archives . 2003. Archived from the original on 26 September 2007. Retrieved 11 May 2019 .
^ Reynolds, Mairead (1983). A History of The Irish Post Office . Dublin, Ireland: MacDonnell Whyte Ltd. pp. 61–62. ISBN 0-9502619-7-1 .
^ "Axmouth to Lyme Regis: The Undercliff, The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site" . Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 12 September 2007 .
^ Berry, George (1970). Discovering Schools . Tring: Shire Publications. ISBN 0-85263-091-3 .
^ Friar, Stephen (2001). The Sutton Companion to Local History (rev. ed.). Stroud: Sutton Publishing. p. 243. ISBN 0-7509-2723-2 .
^ Nelson, Sioban (2001). Say Little, Do Much: Nursing, Nuns and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-3614-9 .
^ Experimental Researches in Electricity . Retrieved 12 September 2007 .
^ "Kirkpatrick Macmillan (1812–1878)" . Historic Figures . BBC . Retrieved 12 February 2011 .
^ Ruskin (1908). Complete Works 35 : Praeterita Archived 18 April 2017 at the Wayback Machine . London: George Allen. p.613.
^ Creighton, Charles (1894). A History of Epidemics in Britain . Vol. II. Cambridge University Press.
^ Birley, Robert (1962). "Philip James Bailey, Festus ". Sunk Without Trace: some forgotten masterpieces reconsidered . London: Rupert Hart-Davis. pp. 172–208 .