1839 in the United Kingdom

Events from the year 1839 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

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

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 – The 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 – 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. ^[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 – The first Royal Show (agricultural show) is held in Oxford.
• 4 July – Chartists riot in Birmingham. ^[10]
• 15 July – The first clipper ship is 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 Britain prepares to wage the First Opium War. ^[7]
• 27 August – County Police Act enables the appointment of police in rural areas. ^[15] On 28 November, Wiltshire becomes the first county to appoint a chief constable under the act. ^[16] 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 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. ^[17] 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, Nemesis 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. ^[18]
• 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. ^[19]
• 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. ^[20]

Undated

• Sisters of Mercy establish the first native Roman Catholic convent in England since the Reformation, at Bermondsey in London. ^[21]
• Michael Faraday publishes Experimental Researches in Electricity ^[22] clarifying the true nature of electricity.
• Claimed invention of the rear-wheel driven bicycle by Kirkpatrick Macmillan in Scotland. ^[23]
• Summer – John Ruskin visits Cornwall, regretting that reading for his Oxford degree interferes with his study of basalt at St Michael's Mount. ^[24]

Ongoing

• Smallpox epidemic of 1837–40. ^[25]

Publications

• Philip James Bailey's (anonymous) poem Festus. ^[26]
• 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

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, Wikipedia Library access 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. "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. 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. Friar, Stephen (2001). The Sutton Companion to Local History (rev. ed.). Stroud: Sutton Publishing. p. 243. ISBN   0-7509-2723-2.
16. "Wiltshire Constabulary History". Wiltshire Police. 18 December 2007. Archived from the original on 18 December 2007 – via Wayback Machine.
17. "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.
18. Berry, George (1979). Discovering Schools. Tring: Shire Publications. ISBN   0-85263-091-3.
19. Reynolds, Mairead (1983). A History of The Irish Post Office. Dublin, Ireland: MacDonnell Whyte Ltd. pp. 61–62. ISBN   0-9502619-7-1.
20. "Axmouth to Lyme Regis: The Undercliff, The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site". Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 12 September 2007.
21. 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.
22. Experimental Researches in Electricity . Retrieved 12 September 2007.
23. "Kirkpatrick Macmillan (1812–1878)". Historic Figures. BBC . Retrieved 12 February 2011.
24. Ruskin (1908). Complete Works35: Praeterita Archived 18 April 2017 at the Wayback Machine . London: George Allen. p.613.
25. Creighton, Charles (1894). A History of Epidemics in Britain. Vol. II. Cambridge University Press.
26. Birley, Robert (1962). "Philip James Bailey, Festus". Sunk Without Trace: some forgotten masterpieces reconsidered . London: Rupert Hart-Davis. pp.  172–208.