1823 in the United Kingdom

1823 in the United Kingdom

Other years

1821 | 1822 | 1823 | 1824 | 1825

Sport

1823 English cricket season

Events from the year 1823 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

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

Events

• January – the King's Library, George III's personal library of 65,000 volumes, 19,000 pamphlets, maps, charts and topographical drawings, is offered to the British Museum.
• 23 January – in Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula, William Buckland inspects the "Red Lady of Paviland", the first identification of a prehistoric (male) human burial.^[1]
• 20 February – explorer James Weddell's expedition to Antarctica reaches latitude 74°15' S and longitude 34°16'45" W: the southernmost position any ship had reached before, a record that will hold for more than 80 years.
• March – Royal Academy of Music opens.^[2]
• 17 June – Charles Macintosh patents the waterproof material later used to make Mackintosh coats.^[3]
• July – Robert Peel ensures the passage of five Acts of Parliament, effectively abolishing the death penalty for over one hundred offences;^[2] in particular, the Judgement of Death Act allows judges to commute sentences for capital offences other than murder or treason to imprisonment or transportation.^[4]
• 4 July – Transportation Act allows convicts transported to the colonies to be employed on public works.^[2]
• 10 July – Gaols Act passed by Parliament, based on the prison reform campaign of Elizabeth Fry.^[2]
• 23 September – First Burmese War: Burmese attack the British on Shapura, an island close to Chittagong.
• 25 November – opening of The Royal Suspension Chain Pier at Brighton, designed by Captain Samuel Brown, RN, the first pleasure pier on the mainland of England.^[5]
• November – according to tradition, William Webb Ellis invents rugby.^[2]
• 10 December – Mary Anning finds the first complete Plesiosaurus skeleton, on the Jurassic Coast.^[6]

Undated

• Beginning of the first Anglo-Ashanti war.
• Excise Act reduces duties on the distillation of whisky, encouraging its commercial production.

Publications

• Thomas Campbell's poem The Last Man.
• Thomas De Quincey's critical essay On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth (in The London Magazine, October).
• Mrs Markham's children's A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the End of the Reign of George III
• Sir Walter Scott's novels Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward and St. Ronan's Well.
• Thomas Wakley's medical journal The Lancet (first published 5 October ).

Births

• 3 January – Robert Whitehead, marine engineer (died 1905)
• 8 January – Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalist and biologist (died 1913)
• 13 August – Goldwin Smith, historian (died 1910)
• 3 September – Hardinge Giffard, 1st Earl of Halsbury, lawyer, Lord Chancellor (died 1921)

Deaths

• 26 January – Edward Jenner, physician and pioneer of vaccination (born 1749)
• 27 January – Charles Hutton, mathematician (born 1737)
• 7 February – Mrs Radcliffe, writer (born 1764)
• 26 February – John Philip Kemble, actor (born 1757)
• 14 March – John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent, Royal Navy admiral (born 1735)
• 23 April – Joseph Nollekens, sculptor (born 1737)
• 19 June – William Combe, writer, poet and adventurer (born 1742)
• 8 July – Sir Henry Raeburn, Scottish portrait painter (born 1756)
• 11 September – David Ricardo, economist (born 1772)
• 23 September – Matthew Baillie, Scottish-born physician and pathologist (born 1761)
• 30 October – Edmund Cartwright, clergyman and inventor of the power loom (born 1743)

References

See also