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.)

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III
• Prime Minister – William Pitt the Younger (Tory)^[1]
• Foreign Secretary – Lord Grenville

Events

• 27 May – Pitt–Tierney duel takes place on Putney Heath outside London. The Prime Minister William Pitt fights a duel against the opposition politician George Tierney
• 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;^[2] 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.^[3]
• 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.^[4]
• 18 September – Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is first published^[4] 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.^[5]

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.^[6]
• Thomas Malthus' anonymous work An Essay on the Principle of Population.^[4]
• 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.^[7]
• Mary Wollstonecraft's posthumous radical feminist novel Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman.

Births

• March – David Ramsay Hay, interior decorator (died 1866)
• 28 April – Duncan Forbes, linguist (died 1868)
• 12 June – William Abbot, actor (died 1843)
• 28 December – Thomas Henderson, astronomer (died 1844)^[8]

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)

See also

• 1798 in Wales