1798 in Great Britain

Events from the year 1798 in Great Britain. (See also 1798 in Ireland, then a separate kingdom although under the same monarch.)

1798 in Great Britain:

Other years

1796 | 1797 | 1798 | 1799 | 1800

Sport

1798 English cricket season

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III
• Prime Minister – William Pitt the Younger (Tory)
• Parliament – 18th

Events

• 2 July – the Marine Police Force is formed on the River Thames by magistrate Patrick Colquhoun to prevent pilfering in the Port of London and West India Docks;[1] it is the first organised police force in Britain.
• 1 August – French Revolutionary Wars: Admiral Nelson's fleet destroys the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile.[2]
• 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.[3]
• 18 September – Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is first published[3] anonymously in Bristol, marking the beginning of English literary Romanticism. Most of the poems are by Wordsworth, including Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798, but also including the first publication of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. First London publication is on 4 October.
• 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.[4]

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 Lyrical Ballads.
• Edward Jenner's work on vaccination An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ.[5]
• Thomas Malthus' anonymous work An Essay on the Principle of Population.[3]
• 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.[6]
• Mary Wollstonecraft's posthumous radical feminist novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman.

Births

• March – David Hay, interior decorator (died 1866)
• 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. Paterson, Dick. "History – Origins". Thames Police. Retrieved 2017-04-14.
2. Williams, Hywel (2005). Cassell's Chronology of World History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. pp. 347–348. ISBN 0-304-35730-8.
3. Everett, Jason M., ed. (2006). "1798". The People's Chronology. Thomson Gale.
4. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
5. The Hutchinson Factfinder. Helicon. 1999. ISBN 1-85986-000-1.
6. Leavis, Q. D. (1965). Fiction and the Reading Public (rev. ed.). London: Chatto & Windus.

See also