1798 in Great Britain

1798 in Great Britain:

Other years

1796 | 1797 | 1798 | 1799 | 1800

Countries of the United Kingdom

Scotland

Sport

1798 English cricket season

Events from the year 1798 in Great Britain . (See also 1798 in Ireland, then a separate kingdom although under the same monarch.)

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III
• Prime Minister – William Pitt the Younger (Tory) ^[1]
• Foreign Secretary – Lord Grenville

Events

• 27 May – Pitt–Tierney duel takes place on Putney Heath outside London. The Prime Minister William Pitt fights a duel against the opposition politician George Tierney
• 2 July – the Marine Police Force is formed on the River Thames by magistrate Patrick Colquhoun to prevent pilfering in the Port of London and West India Docks; ^[2] it is the first organised police force in Britain.
• 1 August – French Revolutionary Wars: Admiral Nelson's fleet destroys the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. ^[3]
• 10 September – Battle of St. George's Caye: British settlers win a victory over Spanish settlers in what is to become the colony of British Honduras. ^[4]
• 18 September – Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is first published ^[4] anonymously in Bristol, marking the beginning of English literary Romanticism. Most of the poems are by Wordsworth, including Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798 , but also including the first publication of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere . First London publication is on 4 October.
• 11 October – Elizabeth Inchbald's play Lovers' Vows , adapted from Kotzebue's Das Kind der Liebe, is first performed at London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
• 4 December – British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger announces the introduction of income tax in 1799. ^[5]

Undated

• Newspaper Publication Act 1798 restricts newspaper circulation.
• Nathan Mayer Rothschild moves from Frankfurt in the Holy Roman Empire to England, settling up in business as a textile trader and financier in Manchester.
• The first recorded excavations at Stonehenge – among the first serious work in archaeology anywhere – are made by William Cunnington and Sir Richard Colt Hoare.

Ongoing

• Anglo-Spanish War, 1796–1808
• French Revolutionary Wars

Publications

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads .
• Edward Jenner's work on vaccination An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ. ^[6]
• Thomas Malthus' anonymous work An Essay on the Principle of Population . ^[4]
• Richmal Mangnall's initially anonymous school textbook Historical and Miscellaneous Questions for the Use of Young People; this will have appeared in 84 editions by 1857.
• Regina Maria Roche's Gothic novel Clermont: a tale . ^[7]
• Mary Wollstonecraft's posthumous radical feminist novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman .

Births

• March – David Ramsay Hay, interior decorator (died 1866)
• 28 April – Duncan Forbes, linguist (died 1868)
• 12 June – William Abbot, actor (died 1843)
• 28 December – Thomas Henderson, astronomer (died 1844) ^[8]

Deaths

• 12 May – George Vancouver, explorer (born 1757)
• 19 May – William Byron, 5th Baron Byron, dueller (born 1722)
• 19 June – William Jennens, financier, richest commoner in England (born 1701)
• 25 June – Thomas Sandby, cartographer and architect (born 1721)

See also

• 1798 in Wales

References

1. "History of William Pitt 'The Younger' - GOV.UK". www.gov.uk. Retrieved 1 July 2023.
2. Paterson, Dick. "History – Origins". Thames Police. Retrieved 2017-04-14.
3. Williams, Hywel (2005). Cassell's Chronology of World History . London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp.  347–348. ISBN   0-304-35730-8.
4. Everett, Jason M., ed. (2006). "1798". The People's Chronology. Thomson Gale.
5. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN   0-14-102715-0.
6. The Hutchinson Factfinder. Helicon. 1999. ISBN   1-85986-000-1.
7. Leavis, Q. D. (1965). Fiction and the Reading Public (rev. ed.). London: Chatto & Windus.
8. Trimble, Virginia; Williams, Thomas; Bracher, Katherine; Jarrell, Richard; Marché, Jordan D.; Ragep, F. Jamil (18 September 2007). Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 482. ISBN   978-0-387-30400-7.