1839 in the United Kingdom

UK-related events during the year of 1839

1839 in the United Kingdom

Other years
1837 | 1838 | 1839 (1839) | 1840 | 1841
Constituent countries of the United Kingdom
England | Ireland | Scotland | Wales
Sport
1839 English cricket season

Events from the year 1839 in the United Kingdom.

## Incumbents

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* Monarch – Victoria
* Prime Minister – William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (Whig)
* Foreign Secretary – Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

## Events

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* 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
* 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.
* 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]

### Undated

[edit]

* County Police Act enables the appointment of police in rural areas[19] and City of London Police Act confirms establishment of a force in the City.
* Sisters of Mercy establish the first native Roman Catholic convent in England since the Reformation, at Bermondsey in London.[20]
* Michael Faraday publishes Experimental Researches in Electricity[21] clarifying the true nature of electricity.
* Claimed invention of the rear-wheel driven bicycle by Kirkpatrick Macmillan in Scotland.[22]
* Summer – John Ruskin visits Cornwall, regretting that reading for his Oxford degree interferes with his study of basalt at St Michael's Mount.[23]

### Ongoing

[edit]

* Smallpox epidemic of 1837–40.[24]

## Publications

[edit]

* Philip James Bailey's (anonymous) poem Festus.[25]
* 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

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* 7 January – Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé), novelist (died 1908)
* 16 March – John Butler Yeats, Irish painter (died 1922)
* 17 June – Arthur Tooth, Anglican clergyman prosecuted for Ritualist practices in the 1870s (died 1931)
* 18 July – James Surtees Phillpotts, educationalist (died 1930)
* 4 August – Walter Pater, essayist and critic (died 1894)
* 19 September – George Cadbury, businessman (died 1922)
* 7 December – Redvers Buller, general, Victoria Cross recipient (died 1908)
* 22 December – John Nevil Maskelyne, stage magician (died 1917)

## Deaths

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* 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)

## References

[edit]

1. ^ 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.)
2. ^ Clark, Nick (6 July 2015). "The leaf storm". i. No. 1438\. London. p. 27.
3. ^ Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
4. ^ "Grand National History 1839–1836". The-grand-national.co.uk. Archived from the original on 21 February 2011. Retrieved 11 March 2011.
5. ^ "Facts & Figures". Grandnational.org.uk. Retrieved 11 March 2011.
6. ^ 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.
7. ^ a b "Icons, a portrait of England 1820–1840". Archived from the original on 12 March 2006. Retrieved 2 December 2015.
8. ^ "National Gallery information". Archived from the original on 8 August 2007. Retrieved 29 June 2010.
9. ^ "History of the Society". Ecclesiological Society. Archived from the original on 26 July 2011. Retrieved 4 May 2011.
10. ^ a b c Palmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 263–264. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
11. ^ Loveland, Ian (2000). Political Libels: A Comparative Study. Oxford: Hart Publishing. pp. 21–22. ISBN 1-84113-115-6.
12. ^ "St. Hilda". Durham Mining Museum. Retrieved 22 May 2021.
13. ^ "Scottish Maid". Scottish Built Ships. Aberdeen City Council. Retrieved 25 April 2014.
14. ^ "National Army Museum : Exhibitions : Afghanistan". Archived from the original on 24 October 2007. Retrieved 12 September 2007.
15. ^ "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.
16. ^ Reynolds, Mairead (1983). A History of The Irish Post Office. Dublin, Ireland: MacDonnell Whyte Ltd. pp. 61–62. ISBN 0-9502619-7-1.
17. ^ "Axmouth to Lyme Regis: The Undercliff, The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site". Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 12 September 2007.
18. ^ Berry, George (1970). Discovering Schools. Tring: Shire Publications. ISBN 0-85263-091-3.
19. ^ Friar, Stephen (2001). The Sutton Companion to Local History (rev. ed.). Stroud: Sutton Publishing. p. 243\. ISBN 0-7509-2723-2.
20. ^ 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.
21. ^ Experimental Researches in Electricity. Retrieved 12 September 2007.
22. ^ "Kirkpatrick Macmillan (1812–1878)". Historic Figures. BBC. Retrieved 12 February 2011.
23. ^ Ruskin (1908). Complete Works 35: Praeterita Archived 18 April 2017 at the Wayback Machine. London: George Allen. p.613.
24. ^ Creighton, Charles (1894). A History of Epidemics in Britain. Vol. II. Cambridge University Press.
25. ^ Birley, Robert (1962). "Philip James Bailey, Festus". Sunk Without Trace: some forgotten masterpieces reconsidered. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. pp. 172–208.

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1839 in Europe

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