1849 in the United Kingdom

Events from the year 1849 in the United Kingdom.

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Lord John Russell (Whig)
• Foreign Secretary – Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

• 13 January – Second Anglo-Sikh War: British forces retreat from the Battle of Chillianwala.
• 22 January – Second Anglo-Sikh War: The city of Multan falls to the British East India Company following the Siege of Multan.
• February–May – shareholder enquiries into the conduct of railway financier George Hudson begin his downfall
• 1 February – abolition of the Corn Laws by the Importation Act 1846 comes fully into effect.
• 17 February – 65 people, almost all under the age of 20, are crushed to death in a panic caused by a small fire in the Theatre Royal, Glasgow.^[1]
• 21 February – Second Anglo-Sikh War: Battle of Gujrat – British East India Company forces defeat those of the Sikh Empire in Punjab.
• 1 March – Nathaniel Cooke registers the design of the Staunton chess set, which is first marketed in September by Jaques of London with an endorsement by Howard Staunton.
• 3 March – the Arana-Southern Treaty with the Argentine Confederation ends British involvement in the Anglo-French blockade of the Río de la Plata.
• 30 March – the Second Anglo-Sikh War ends with the U.K. annexing the Punjab.
• 21 April – Great Famine (Ireland): 96 inmates of the overcrowded Ballinrobe Union Workhouse die over the course of the preceding week from illness and other famine-related conditions, a record high. This year's potato crop again fails and there are renewed outbreaks of cholera.^[2]
• May – first exhibition of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London: John Everett Millais' Isabella and Holman Hunt's Rienzi at the Royal Academy summer exhibition, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Girlhood of Mary Virgin at the Free Exhibition on Hyde Park Corner.
• 19 May – Irishman William Hamilton arrested after shooting blank shots at Queen Victoria on Constitution Hill, London.^[3]
• Summer
  • The Buckinghamshire Assizes are removed from Buckingham to Aylesbury.^[4]
  • Karl Marx moves from Paris to London, where he will spend the remainder of his life.
• 2–12 August – Visit of Queen Victoria to Cork, Dublin and Belfast.^[5]
• 9 August – "The Bermondsey Horror": Marie Manning and her husband, Frederick, murder her lover Patrick O'Connor in London. On 13 November they are hanged together publicly before a large crowd by William Calcraft outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol for the crime.^[6]
• 13 December – foundation stone of Llandovery College is laid.
• 17 December – a customer, probably Edward Coke, collects the first bowler hat (devised by London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler) from hatters Lock & Co. of St James's.^[7]

• Navigation Acts repealed.^[8]
• Two shilling coin (florin), depicting the Queen crowned, introduced, partly to test public opinion on possible decimalization of the currency.^[9]
• Bedford College (London) founded by Elizabeth Jesser Reid as the Ladies College in Bedford Square, a non-sectarian higher education institution to provide a liberal female education.
• The drapers' store of Arthur & Fraser, predecessor of the House of Fraser, is established in Glasgow by Hugh Fraser and James Arthur.^[10]

• The 1846–1860 cholera pandemic claims 52,000 lives in England and Wales between 1848 and 1850.

• Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley (published as by Currer Bell).
• Thomas De Quincey's essay The English Mail-Coach (in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, October–December).
• Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield begins serialisation (May).
• J. A. Froude's controversial novel of religious doubt The Nemesis of Faith.^[11][12][13]
• John Ruskin's essay The Seven Lamps of Architecture (May).
• Notes and Queries first published (November).
• Who's Who first published.

• 13 February – Lord Randolph Churchill, statesman (died 1895)
• 22 May – Aston Webb, architect (died 1930)
• 11 July
  • N. E. Brown, English plant taxonomist (died 1934)
  • Rollo Russell, son to the serving Prime Minister (died 1914)
• 24 November – Frances Hodgson Burnett, author (died 1924)
• 29 November – John Ambrose Fleming, electrical engineer and inventor (died 1945)

• 9 January – William Siborne, Army officer and military historian (born 1797)
• 19 February – Bernard Barton, poet (born 1784)
• 20 March – James Justinian Morier, diplomat and novelist (born 1780)
• 22 May – Maria Edgeworth, novelist (born 1767)
• 25 May – Sir Benjamin D'Urban, general and colonial administrator (born 1777)
• 28 May – Anne Brontë, author (born 1820)^[14]
• 30 June – William Ward, cricketer (born 1787)
• 12 July – Horace Smith, poet (born 1779)
• 31 August – Peter Allan of Marsden, eccentric (born 1799)
• 6 September – Edward Stanley, Bishop of Norwich (born 1779)
• 16 September – Thomas Jones, missionary (born 1810)
• 20 October – Richard Ryan, biographer (born 1797)
• 13 November – William Etty, painter (born 1787)
• 27 November – Henry Seymour (Knoyle), politician (born 1776)
• 2 December – Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, queen dowager of William IV (born 1792)
• 12 December – Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, engineer (born 1769 in France)