1817 in the United Kingdom

1817 in the United Kingdom

Other years

1815 | 1816 | 1817 | 1818 | 1819

Sport

1817 English cricket season

Events from the year 1817 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III
• Prime Minister – Lord Liverpool (Tory)

Events

• 25 January – The Scotsman is first published in Edinburgh as a liberal weekly newspaper by lawyer William Ritchie and customs official Charles Maclaren.^[1]
• February – last major Luddite attack, against lace-making machines in Loughborough.^[2]
• 4 March – habeas corpus suspended amidst fears of insurrection (to January 1818).^[2]
• 10 March – the Blanketeers set out to march from Manchester to London; on 11 March, 160 are arrested at Stockport.^[3]
• 1 April – Blackwood's Magazine is launched as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, a Tory publication. In October the publisher, William Blackwood, relaunches it as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
• 3 April – 'Princess Caraboo' appears in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire.
• 9–10 June – Pentrich Rising: Army prevents protesting labourers from Derbyshire, roused by an agent provocateur, marching on Nottingham.^[2]
• 18 June – Waterloo Bridge opens in London.^[4]
• 5 July – the Sovereign coin reintroduced.^[4]
• 18–20 December – William Hone successfully defends himself in a London court on charges arising from his publication of political satires.
• December – publication together of Jane Austen's first and last completed novels, respectively Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, by John Murray in London (dated 1818), six months after the author's death at Winchester. Her brother Henry Austen contributes a biographical note which for the first time publicly identifies her as the author of all her (previously anonymous) novels.

Undated

• Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, designed by John Soane as Britain's first purpose-built public art gallery, is completed and opened.
• Elgin Marbles displayed in British Museum.
• John Kidd extracts naphthalene from coal tar.
• A Typhus epidemic occurs in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
• John Constable paints Flatford Mill.^[2]
• Gas lighting is introduced on stage in London's West End theatres: on 6 August by The English Opera House (extended to the auditorium on 8 September) and on 6 September at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (where it is already installed in the auditorium and foyer) and Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (as a demonstration).^[2][5]
• Approximate date – Britain's longest tramroad tunnel is opened at Blaenavon, more than a mile (2400m) in length.^[6]

Publications

• Jane Austen's novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
• Lord Byron's dramatic poem Manfred.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.
• Thomas Moore's poem Lalla Rookh: an oriental romance.^[7]
• Thomas Love Peacock's novel Melincourt.
• David Ricardo's treatise On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
• Thomas Rickman's An Attempt to discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation, the first systematic treatise on Gothic architecture.
• Walter Scott's anonymous novel Rob Roy.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's travelogue History of a Six Weeks' Tour (largely the work of Mary Shelley) and poem Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.

Births

• 6 January – J. J. McCarthy, architect (died 1882)
• 8 January – Sir Theophilus Shepstone, British-born South African statesman (died 1893)
• 23 January – John Cassell, publisher and entrepreneur (died 1865)
• 13 April – George Holyoake, secularist and promoter of the cooperative movement (died 1906)
• 15 July – John Fowler, civil engineer (died 1898)
• 30 June – Joseph Dalton Hooker, botanist (died 1911)

Deaths

• 18 July – Jane Austen, novelist (born 1775)
• 6 November – Princess Charlotte, daughter of the Prince and Princess of Wales and second in line to the throne (born 1796)
• 27 December – Sir Richard Onslow, 1st Baronet, naval commander (born 1741)

References

See also