1839 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (Whig)
• Foreign Secretary – Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
• Home Secretary – Lord John Russell (until 30 August) Constantine Phipps, 1st Marquess of Normanby (from 30 August)

Events

• January – The first parallax measurement of the distance to Alpha Centauri is published by Thomas Henderson.
• 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.
• 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 – The first nationally recognised Grand National run, at Aintree. It is won by Jem Mason riding Lottery.
• 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.
• 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.
  • Cambridge Camden Society established by John Mason Neale, Alexander Beresford Hope and Benjamin Webb to promote Gothic architecture.
• 1 May – The 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.
• 13 May – First Rebecca Riots targeted against Welsh turnpikes, at Efailwen in Carmarthenshire.
• 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.
• 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.
• July – The first Royal Show (agricultural show) is held in Oxford.
• 4 July – Chartists riot in Birmingham.
• 15 July – The first clipper ship is launched in Britain, the schooner Scottish Maid at Alexander Hall's yard in Aberdeen.
• 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.
• 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 Britain prepares to wage the First Opium War.
• 27 August – County Police Act enables the appointment of police in rural areas. On 28 November, Wiltshire becomes the first county to appoint a chief constable under the act. Also this year, City of London Police Act confirms establishment of a force in the City.
• 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 and 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. This is the last large-scale armed civil rebellion against authority in mainland Britain and sees the most deaths.
• 23 November – Launch of the first British ocean-going iron warship, for the East India Company, by William Laird at Birkenhead.
• December – New Committee of Council on education sets up a new national system of Inspectors of Schools for grant-aided establishments.
• 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.
• 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.

Undated

• Sisters of Mercy establish the first native Roman Catholic convent in England since the Reformation, at Bermondsey in London.
• Michael Faraday publishes Experimental Researches in Electricity clarifying the true nature of electricity.
• Claimed invention of the rear-wheel driven bicycle by Kirkpatrick Macmillan in Scotland.
• Summer – John Ruskin visits Cornwall, regretting that reading for his Oxford degree interferes with his study of basalt at St Michael's Mount.

Ongoing

• Smallpox epidemic of 1837–40.

Publications

• Philip James Bailey's (anonymous) poem Festus.
• 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 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

• 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

References

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