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1844 in the United Kingdom

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1844 in the United Kingdom

Events from the year 1844 in the United Kingdom.

Contents

Incumbents

  • Monarch – Victoria
  • Prime Minister – Robert Peel (Conservative)

    • Events

  • 28 February — The Grand National at Aintree is won by the 5/1 joint favourite Discount.
  • 11 April — Initiation of the Ragged Schools Union.
  • 11 May — Major fire at Lyme Regis.
  • 6 June — George Williams founds the Young Men's Christian Association in London.
  • 15 June — Factory Act imposes a maximum 12-hour working day for women, and a maximum 6-hour day for children aged 6 to 13.
  • 19 July — Bank Charter Act restricts powers of British banks other than the Bank of England to issue banknotes of the pound sterling.
  • 9 August — Imprisonment for debt abolished in England.
  • 21 & 27 August — Consecration of two new major urban Roman Catholic churches, both designed by Augustus Pugin, which will in the 1850s be elevated to cathedral status: St Mary's Church, Newcastle upon Tyne and St Barnabas Church, Nottingham. (In October, Pugin occupies The Grange, Ramsgate, a house designed for himself which is influential in the development of domestic Gothic Revival architecture.)
  • 28 September — A blackdamp explosion at Haswell Colliery in the Durham Coalfield kills 95, with just four survivors.
  • 28 October — The Royal Exchange in London opened by Queen Victoria.
  • 21 December — The Rochdale Pioneers, usually considered the first successful cooperative enterprise, open their store in Rochdale, forming the basis for the modern cooperative movement.

    • Undated

  • Henry Hardinge, 1st Viscount Hardinge appointed as Governor-General of India.
  • Winsford rock salt mine opens in Cheshire; by 2014 it will be Britain's oldest working mine.
  • Ring of bells installed at St John the Evangelist's Church, Kirkham (Lancashire), said to be the first peal rung in an English Roman Catholic church since the Reformation.
  • "Surplice riots" in Exeter and London break out in opposition to supposed Catholicisation of the Church of England.

    • Publications

  • Robert Chambers' anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which paves the way for acceptance of Darwin's The Origin of Species.
  • Charles Dickens' novel Martin Chuzzlewit (complete in book form) and his Christmas novella The Chimes.
  • Benjamin Disraeli's novel Coningsby.
  • Henry Fox Talbot's book The Pencil of Nature, the first illustrated with photographs from a camera (publication commences June).
  • William Makepeace Thackeray's novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon (serialisation).

    • Births

  • 3 May — Richard D'Oyly Carte, theatrical impresario (died 1901)
  • 22 July — William Archibald Spooner, scholar and Anglican priest (died 1930)
  • 28 July — Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poet (died 1889)
  • 6 August — Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, second son of Queen Victoria (died 1900)
  • 29 August — Edward Carpenter, Socialist poet (died 1929)
  • 23 October — Robert Bridges, English poet (died 1930)
  • 25 October — Arthur William à Beckett, journalist (died 1909)
  • 1 December — Alexandra of Denmark, queen of Edward VII (died 1925)

    • Deaths

  • 23 January — Francis Burdett, politician (born 1770)
  • 15 February — Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (born 1757)
  • 27 July — John Dalton, chemist and physicist (born 1766)
  • 2 November — Augustus Wall Callcott, landscape painter (born 1779)
  • 23 November — Thomas James Henderson, astronomer (born 1798)

    • References

    1844 in the United Kingdom Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA