1843 in the United Kingdom

1843 in the United Kingdom:

Other years

1841 | 1842 | 1843 | 1844 | 1845

Sport

1843 English cricket season

Events from the year 1843 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

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

Events

• January — The Quaker magazine The Friend begins publication.
• 6 January — Antarctic explorer James Clark Ross discovers Snow Hill Island.
• 20 January — Daniel M'Naghten shoots and kills the Prime Minister's private secretary, Edward Drummond, in Whitehall.^[1]
• 4 March — M'Naghten is found not guilty of murder "by reason of insanity", giving rise to the M'Naghten Rules on criminal responsibility, and subsequently committed to Bethlem Hospital.^[1]
• 24 March — Battle of Hyderabad: The Bombay Army led by Major General Sir Charles Napier defeats the Talpur Emirs, securing Sindh province for the British Raj.
• 25 March — Marc Isambard Brunel's Thames Tunnel, the first tunnel under the River Thames, is opened.^[2]
• 27 March — Decision in Foss v Harbottle, a leading precedent in English corporate law, declares that in any action in which a wrong is alleged to have been done to a company, the proper claimant is the company itself and not individual shareholders.^[3]
• 4 April — William Wordsworth accepts the office of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom following the death of Robert Southey on 21 March.^[4]
• 4 May — Natal proclaimed British colony.^[5]
• 18 May — The Disruption of the Church of Scotland takes place in Edinburgh.
• 19 July — Isambard Kingdom Brunel's SS Great Britain is launched from Bristol.^[6]
• September — Ada Lovelace translates and expands Menabrea’s notes on Charles Babbage's analytical engine, including an algorithm for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, regarded as the world's first computer program.^[7][8][9]
• 2 September — The Economist newspaper first published (preliminary issue dated August).
• 1 October — News of the World newspaper first published.^[2] It will survive until 2011.
• 3 November–4 November — The statue of Nelson placed atop Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London.^[2]
• 13 December — Basutoland becomes a British protectorate.^[5]
• December — The world's first Christmas cards, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole in London from the artist John Callcott Horsley, are sent.^[10]

Undated

• Theatres Act ends the virtual monopoly on theatrical performances held by the patent theatres, encouraging the development of popular entertainment.^[5]
• Protestant Martyrs' Memorial erected in Oxford.^[11]

Publications

• Charles Dickens's novel Martin Chuzzlewit (begins serialisation January) and novella A Christmas Carol (17 December).
• John Stuart Mill’s book A System of Logic.
• John Ruskin's book Modern Painters, vol. 1.
• Robert Smith Surtees' comic novel Handley Cross.

Births

• 25 April — Princess Alice, member of the royal family (died 1878)
• 30 June — Ernest Satow, diplomat and scholar (died 1929)

Deaths

• 9 January — William Hedley, inventor and locomotive engineer (born 1779)
• 21 March — Robert Southey, poet (born 1774)
• 25 March — Robert Murray M'Cheyne, clergyman (born 1813)
• 21 April — Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (born 1773)
• 1 June — William Abbot, actor (born 1798)
• 25 July — Charles Macintosh, chemist (born 1766)
• 18 December — Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch, Governor-General of India (born 1748)

References

1. Moran, Richard (2004). "McNaughtan, Daniel (1802/3–1865)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2011-02-02.(subscription or UK public library membership required)
2. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
3. Slapper, Gary (19 June 2008). "The cases that changed Britain: 1785-1869". The Times. Retrieved 2011-06-16.
4. Pinion, F. B. (1988). A Wordsworth Chronology. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. p. 201. ISBN 0-333-38860-7.
5. Palmer, Alan; Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 266–267. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
6. "Royal Visit". The Bristol Mirror. 20 July 1843. pp. 1–2.
7. Fuegi, John; Francis, Jo (October–December 2003). "Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25 (4): 16–26. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2003.1253887.
8. "Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace". Archived from the original on 21 July 2010. Retrieved 2010-07-11.
9. Menabrea, L. F. (1843). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage". Scientific Memoirs 3. Archived from the original on 13 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-01.
10. Buday, György (1992). "The history of the Christmas card". Omnigraphics: 8.
11. Lewis, Darcy (2006). "Timeline: Oxford". TimeTravel-Britain.com. Retrieved 2010-10-18.