1798 in Great Britain

1798 in Great Britain:

Other years

1796 | 1797 | 1798 | 1799 | 1800

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)

Events

• 13 July - William Wordsworth's poem Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798 is written.
• 1 August - French Revolutionary Wars: Admiral Nelson's fleet destroys the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile.^[1]
• 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.^[2]
• 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.^[3]

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 anonymous collection Lyrical Ballads (including Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere).^[2]
• Edward Jenner's work on vaccination An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ.^[4]
• Thomas Malthus' anonymous work An Essay on the Principle of Population.^[2]
• 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.^[5]
• Mary Wollstonecraft's posthumous radical feminist novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman.

Births

• 28 April - Duncan Forbes, linguist (died 1868)
• 12 June - William Abbot, actor (died 1843)
• 28 December - Thomas James Henderson, astronomer (died 1844)

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)

References

1. Williams, Hywel (2005). Cassell's Chronology of World History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp. 347–348. ISBN 0-304-35730-8.
2. Everett, Jason M., ed. (2006). "1798". The People's Chronology. Thomson Gale.
3. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
4. The Hutchinson Factfinder. Helicon. 1999. ISBN 1-85986-000-1.
5. Leavis, Q. D. (1965). Fiction and the Reading Public (rev. ed.). London: Chatto & Windus.

See also