1857 in the United Kingdom

1857 in the United Kingdom

Other years

1856 | 1857 | 1858 | 1859

Sport

1857 English cricket season

Events from the year 1857 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (Whig)
• Parliament – 16th (until 21 March), 17th (starting 30 April)

Events

• 7 January – London General Omnibus Company begins operating.[1]
• 3 March – France and the United Kingdom formally declare war on China in the Second Opium War.
• 5 March – in London, barrister James Townsend Saward receives a sentence of penal transportation for forging cheques.
• 27 March – 24 April – a general election secures Palmerston's Whigs a clear majority.[2]
• 4 April – end of the Anglo-Persian War.
• 5 May – 17 October – the Art Treasures of Great Britain exhibition is held in Manchester, one of the largest such displays of all time.[3]
• 10 May – Indian Rebellion: In India, the Mutiny of XI Native Cavalry of the Bengal Army in Meerut, revolt against the British East India Company.[1]
• 11 May – Indian combatants capture Delhi from the East India Company.
• 18 May – British Museum Reading Room opens.[2]
• 22 June – the South Kensington Museum, predecessor of the Victoria and Albert Museum, is opened by Queen Victoria in London;[4] it is the world’s first museum to incorporate a refreshment room.[5]
• 25 June – Queen Victoria formally grants her husband Albert the title Prince Consort.[6]
• 26 June – at a ceremony in Hyde Park, London, Queen Victoria awards the first sixty-six Victoria Crosses,[1] for actions during the Crimean War. Commander Henry James Raby, RN, is the first to receive the medal from her hands.
• 12 July – in Belfast, confrontations between crowds of Catholics and Protestants turn into 10 days of rioting, exacerbated by the open-air preaching of Evangelical Presbyterian minister "Roaring" Hugh Hanna,[7] with many of the police force joining the Protestant side. There are also riots in Derry, Portadown and Lurgan.[8]
• 18 July – prison hulk HMS Defence catches fire at her moorings off Woolwich, bringing an end to the use of hulks in home waters.[9]
• 28 August – Matrimonial Causes Act removes divorce from ecclesiastical jurisdiction and makes it possible by order of a new civil Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, removing the necessity of parliamentary approval.[2]
• September – Obscene Publications Act makes the sale of obscene material a statutory offence.[10]
• 20 September – British forces recapture Delhi,[2] compelling the surrender of Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor.
• 24 October – Sheffield F.C., the world's first football team, is founded in Sheffield.[1]
• November – Kilburn White Horse cut in North Yorkshire.
• 29 November – Orsini affair: Piedmontese revolutionary Felice Orsini leaves exile in London to make an assassination attempt on Emperor Napoleon III of France in Paris.
• 31 December – Queen Victoria chooses Ottawa as the capital of Canada.

Undated

• First official issue of uniforms of the Royal Navy to naval ratings.
• Tom Gallaher sets up the Gallaher tobacco business in Ireland.[11]

Publications

• R. M. Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island.
• George Borrow's novel The Romany Rye.
• Charlotte Brontë's novel The Professor (posthumously, as by 'Currer Bell').
• Charles Dickens's novel Little Dorrit (complete in book form).
• Elizabeth Gaskell's biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
• P. H. Gosse's creationist text Omphalos.
• Thomas Hughes' novel Tom Brown's Schooldays.[2]
• George A. Lawrence's novel Guy Livingstone, or Thorough (anonymously).[12]
• John Ruskin's introductory text The Elements of Drawing.
• William Makepeace Thackeray's historical novel The Virginians (begins serialisation).
• Anthony Trollope's novel Barchester Towers.[13]

Births

• 18 January – William Lethaby, Arts and Crafts architect and designer (died 1931)
• 25 January – Hugh Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale, sportsman (died 1944)
• 31 January – George Jackson Churchward, chief mechanical engineer of the Great Western Railway (died 1933)
• 2 February – Sir James Cory, 1st Baronet, politician and ship-owner (died 1933)
• 22 February – Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement (died 1941)
• 13 March – Herbert Plumer, 1st Viscount Plumer, general (died 1932)
• 14 March – Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, patron and promoter of women's interests (died 1939)[14]
• 27 March – Karl Pearson, statistician (died 1936)
• 8 April – Lucy, Lady Houston, born Fanny Lucy Radmall, political activist, suffragette, philanthropist and promoter of aviation (died 1936)
• 11 April – John Davidson, Scottish-born poet and playwright (suicide 1909)
• 14 April
  • Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom, member of the royal family (died 1944)
  • Victor Horsley, physician, surgeon (died 1916)
• 13 May – Ronald Ross, physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (died 1932)
• 15 May – Williamina Fleming, astronomer (died 1911)
• 28 May – Charles Voysey, Arts and Crafts designer and domestic architect (died 1941)
• 2 June – Edward Elgar, composer (died 1934)
• 12 June – Kate Lester, stage and silent screen actress (died 1924)
• 15 June – William Fife, Scottish yacht designer (died 1944)
• 28 June – Robert Jones, Welsh orthopaedic surgeon (died 1933)
• 19 September – James Bridie, rugby union international (died 1893)
• 28 September – Lewis Bayly, admiral (died 1938)
• 2 October
  • John Macintyre Scottish laryngologist and pioneer radiographer (died 1928)
  • A. E. Waite, occultist (died 1942)
• 4 October – Will Thorne, trade unionist (died 1946)
• 5 November – Joseph Tabrar, songwriter (died 1931)
• 17 November – George Marchant, inventor, manufacturer and philanthropist (died 1941)
• 22 November – George Gissing, novelist (died 1903)
• 27 November – Charles Scott Sherrington, physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1952)
• 30 November – Bobby Abel, cricketer (died 1936)
• 2 December – Robert Armstrong-Jones, physician and psychiatrist (died 1943)

Deaths

• 1 January – John Britton, antiquary and topographer (born 1771)
• 2 January – Andrew Ure, doctor and writer (born 1778)
• 10 February – David Thompson, explorer (born 1770)
• 18 February – Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, politician (born 1800)
• 13 March – William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst, diplomat and peer (born 1773)
• 16 May – Sir William Lloyd, soldier and mountaineer (born 1782)
• 12 August – William Daniel Conybeare, dean of Llandaff (born 1787)
• 16 August – John Jones, Talysarn, leading non-conformist minister (born 1796)
• 29 November – Henry Havelock, general (born 1795)
• 15 December – Sir George Cayley, aviation pioneer (born 1773)
• 17 December – Francis Beaufort, naval officer and hydrographer (born 1774)

See also

• 1857 in Scotland

References

1. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
2. Palmer, Alan; Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 277–278. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
3. Exhib, Manchester art Treasures (1859). Exhibition of art treasures of the United Kingdom, held at Manchester in 1857: report of the Executive Committee. Retrieved 20 September 2010.
4. Sheppard, F.H.W., ed. (1975). Survey of London XXXVIII: The Museums Area of South Kensington and Westminster. p. 99.
5. Physick, John (1982). The Victoria and Albert Museum: the History of its Building. Oxford: Phaidon. p. 30.
6. "No. 22015". The London Gazette. 26 June 1857. p. 2195.
7. Holmes, Finlay (2004). "Hanna, Hugh (1821–1892)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/52699. Retrieved 26 July 2012. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
8. "Parades and Marches - Chronology 2: Historical Dates and Events". Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN). Retrieved 28 January 2010.
9. Gossett, William Patrick (1986). The lost ships of the Royal Navy, 1793-1900. Mansell. p. 114. ISBN 0-7201-1816-6.
10. "The Obscene Publications Act, 1857". h2g2. BBC. Retrieved 11 March 2013.
11. Top 100 Companies Archived 17 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine
12. Leavis, Q.D. (1965). Fiction and the Reading Public (2nd ed.). London: Chatto & Windus.
13. "Icons, a portrait of England 1840–1860". Archived from the original on 17 August 2007. Retrieved 13 September 2007.
14. Ewan, Elizabeth; Pipes, Rose; Rendall, Jane; Reynolds, Siân, eds. (2018). The new biographical dictionary of Scottish women. Edinburgh University Press. p. 3. ISBN 9781474436281.

See also