1831 in the United Kingdom

Events from the year 1831 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch – William IV
• Prime Minister – Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (Whig)
• Foreign Secretary – Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
• Home Secretary – William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
• Secretary of War – Earl of Ripon

Events

• 3 March – Tithe War breaks out in Ireland.
• 7 March – Royal Astronomical Society receives its Royal Charter.
• 12 April – Broughton Suspension Bridge over the River Irwell collapses under marching troops.
• 27 April – End of the First Anglo-Ashanti War (1823–1831).
• 28 April–1 June – General election results in a Whig victory and a mandate for electoral reform.
• May–June – Merthyr Rising in Merthyr Tydfil.
• 30 May – Census in the United Kingdom.
• 1 June – Royal Navy officer and explorer James Clark Ross leads the first expedition to reach the Magnetic North Pole.
• 8 June – Freeminers in the Forest of Dean, led by Warren James, break down enclosures in the Forest.
• 1 August – The new London Bridge is officially opened.
• 18 August – The paddle steamer Rothsay Castle is wrecked at the eastern end of the Menai Strait with the loss of 93 lives.
• 29 August – Michael Faraday demonstrates electromagnetic induction.
• 8 September – Coronation of King William IV.
• 22 September – The House of Commons passes the Great Reform Bill to expand the franchise, but this is later defeated in the Lords.
• 27 September – British Association for the Advancement of Science first meets, in York.
• October – King's College London opens.
• 9–11 October – Reform riots in Nottingham: Nottingham Castle and a silk mill at Beeston are gutted by fire.
• 15 October
• Special Constables Act regularises operation of the Special Constabulary.
• Truck Act prohibits payment of wages other than in cash.
• 26 October – Cholera epidemic begins in Sunderland.
• 28 October – Michael Faraday constructs the first dynamo.
• 29–31 October – 1831 Bristol riots ("Queen Square riots") in Bristol, in connection with the Great Reform Act controversy: 100 city centre properties are destroyed (including the Bishop's palace), at least 120 are estimated to have been killed, 31 of the rioters will be sentenced to death and a colonel facing court-martial for failure to control the riot commits suicide.
• December – First meeting in England of the Plymouth Brethren, organised primarily by George Wigram, Benjamin Wills Newton and John Nelson Darby.
• 27 December – Charles Darwin embarks on his historic voyage aboard from Plymouth.

Undated

• The house which will eventually contain Abbey Road Studios is built in the St John's Wood district of London.

Publications

• January – Joseph Livesey begins publishing The Moral Reformer in Preston, Lancashire, the first publication of the temperance movement in England.
• Mrs Gore's novels Pin Money, Mothers and Daughters, and The Tuileries and her play The School for Coquettes.
• Thomas Hood's poem The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer.
• Thomas Love Peacock's anonymous novel Crotchet Castle.
• Mary Prince's slave narrative The History of Mary Prince.

Births

• 21 March – Dorothea Beale, proponent of women's education (died 1906)
• 7 May – Richard Norman Shaw, architect (died 1912)
• 16 May – David Edward Hughes, musician and professor of music (died 1900)
• 13 June – James Clerk Maxwell, physicist (died 1879)
• 14 October – Samuel Waite Johnson, railway locomotive engineer (died 1912)
• 15 October – Isabella Bird, explorer, writer, photographer and naturalist (died 1904)

Deaths

• 14 February – Henry Maudslay, mechanical engineer (born 1771)
• 21 February – Robert Hall, Baptist minister (born 1764)
• 20 April – John Abernethy, surgeon (born 1764)
• 8 June – Sarah Siddons, actress (born 1755 in Wales)
• 17 August – Patrick Nasmyth, Scottish landscape painter (born 1787)

References