1844 in the United Kingdom

1844 in the United Kingdom

Other years

1842 | 1843 | 1844 (1844) | 1845 | 1846

Constituent countries of the United Kingdom

England | Ireland | Scotland | Wales

Sport

1844 English cricket season

Events from the year 1844 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Robert Peel (Conservative)
• Foreign Secretary – George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen

Events

Disembarkation of Louis-Phillipe at the Royal Clarence Yard, 8 October 1844, by J. M. W. Turner

The Royal Exchange (London), opened by Queen Victoria on 28 October

• 28 February – the Grand National at Aintree is won by the 5/1 joint favourite Discount.
• 11 April – initiation of the Ragged Schools Union.^[1]
• 11 May – major fire at Lyme Regis.^[2]
• May – Henry Hardinge, 1st Viscount Hardinge, appointed as Governor-General of India.^[3]
• 6 June – George Williams founds the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in London.^[4]
• 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.^[5]
• 19 July – Bank Charter Act restricts powers of British banks other than the Bank of England to issue banknotes of the pound sterling.^[6][7]
• 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.)^[8]
• 28 September – a blackdamp explosion at Haswell Colliery in the Durham Coalfield kills 95, with just four survivors.^[9]
• 8 October – Louis-Phillipe, King of the French, arrives in Portsmouth on a visit to Britain.
• 20 October – Counties (Detached Parts) Act 1844 comes into effect, eliminating many outliers or exclaves of counties in England and Wales for civil purposes.
• 28 October – the Royal Exchange in London opened by Queen Victoria.^[10]
• 11 December – Health of Towns Association formed to press for public health improvements.^[11]
• 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.^[4]

Undated

• Winsford rock salt mine opens in Cheshire; by 2014 it will be Britain's oldest working mine.^[12]
• 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.^[13][14]
• "Surplice riots" in Exeter and London break out in opposition to supposed Catholicisation of the Church of England.
• King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony makes an informal summer tour of Britain.

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

• 26 February – Annie Swynnerton, née Robinson, ARA, painter (died 1933)
• 3 May – Richard D'Oyly Carte, theatrical impresario (died 1901)
• 22 July – William Archibald Spooner, scholar, Anglican priest and metathesist (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)^[15]
• 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)

Deaths

• 23 January – Sir Francis Burdett, politician (born 1770)
• 15 February – Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (born 1757)
• 6 March – George Meikle Kemp, architect (born 1795)
• 18 March – Paul Storr, silversmith (born 1770)
• 3 April – Edward Bigge, Archdeacon of Lindisfarne (born 1807)
• 27 July – John Dalton, chemist and physicist (born 1766)
• 23 November – Thomas Henderson, Scottish astronomer (born 1798)^[16]
• 25 November – Sir Augustus Callcott, landscape painter (born 1779)

References

1. Berry, George (1970). Discovering Schools. Tring: Shire Publications. ISBN 0-85263-091-3.
2. The Illustrated London News 18 May 1844.
3. Cates, William L. R. (1863). The Pocket Date Book. Chapman and Hall.
4. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
5. Palmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 266–267. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
6. "The Bank Charter Act 1844" (PDF). OPSI. Retrieved 19 October 2010.
7. Bank of England. "A brief history of banknotes". Retrieved 8 October 2007.
8. Hill, Rosemary (2008). God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-140-28099-9.
9. "Haswell – the 1844 Pit Disaster". A history of Haswell. Archived from the original on 15 August 2009. Retrieved 15 October 2010.
10. "Royal Exchange History". Archived from the original on 14 August 2007. Retrieved 28 October 2007.
11. Ashton, John; Ubido, Janet (1991). "The Healthy City and the Ecological Idea" (PDF). Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. 4 (1): 173–181. doi:10.1093/shm/4.1.173. PMID 11622856. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 December 2013. Retrieved 8 July 2013.
12. "Welcome to Winsford Rock Salt Mine". Salt Union Ltd. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
13. "St John the Evangelist, Kirkham". Taking Stock. Archived from the original on 2 June 2014. Retrieved 2 June 2014.
14. "History". Parish of the Holy Cross. 16 May 2012. Retrieved 2 June 2014.
15. Panton, James (24 February 2011). Historical Dictionary of the British Monarchy. Scarecrow Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-8108-7497-8.
16. 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.