1841 in the United Kingdom

Events from the year 1841 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

 * Monarch – Victoria
 * Prime Minister – William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (Whig) (until 30 August); Robert Peel (Conservative) (starting 30 August)
 * Foreign Secretary – Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (until 2 September) George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen (starting 2 September)

Events

 * 4 January – City of Dublin Steam Packet Company SS Thames is wrecked on the Western Rocks, Isles of Scilly, with the loss of 61 of the 65 on board; at least 20 other ships run aground round the British Isles today.
 * 20 January – Convention of Chuenpi agreed between Charles Elliot and Qishan of the Qing dynasty.
 * 26 January – the United Kingdom formally occupies Hong Kong.
 * 27 January – the active volcano Mount Erebus in Antarctica is discovered and named by James Clark Ross.
 * 28 January – Ross discovers the "Victoria Barrier", later known as the Ross Ice Shelf.
 * February – H. Fox Talbot obtains a patent for the calotype process in photography.
 * 10 February – Penny Red postage stamp replaces the Penny Black.
 * 20 February – the Governor Fenner, carrying emigrants to America, sinks off Holyhead with the loss of 123 lives.
 * 1 March – opening throughout of the Manchester and Leeds Railway, the first to cross the Pennines.
 * 4 March – first performance of Dion Boucicault's comedy London Assurance, presented by Charles Mathews at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.
 * March – Richard Beard opens England's first commercial photographic studio in London, producing daguerreotype portraits.
 * by April – Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew first opens to the public and William Hooker appointed director.
 * 3 May
 * New Zealand becomes a separate British colony, having previously been administered as part of the Colony of New South Wales.
 * London Library opens in Pall Mall.
 * 6 June (Sunday)
 * United Kingdom Census held, the first to record names and approximate ages of every household member and to be administered nationally.
 * Marian Hughes becomes the first woman to take religious vows in communion with the Anglican Province of Canterbury since the Reformation, making them privately to E. B. Pusey in Oxford.
 * 7 June – Lord Melbourne loses a vote of no confidence against his government.
 * 21 June – St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham, dedicated as a Roman Catholic church.
 * 29 June–22 July – general election – Sir Robert Peel's Conservatives take control of the House of Commons.
 * 30 June – Great Western Railway completed throughout between London and Bristol.
 * 5 July – Thomas Cook arranges his first excursion, taking 570 temperance campaigners on the Midland Counties Railway from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough.
 * 17 July – first edition of the humorous magazine Punch published.
 * 26 July – the proprietors of The Skerries Lighthouse off Anglesey, the last privately owned light in the British Isles, are awarded £444,984 in compensation for its sale to Trinity House.
 * 28 August – Melbourne resigns as Prime Minister; replaced by Robert Peel.
 * 2 September – reconsecration of Leeds Parish Church after reconstruction.
 * 21 September – the London and Brighton Railway is opened throughout.
 * 24 September – United Kingdom annexes Sarawak from Brunei; James Brooke is appointed rajah.
 * 10 October – First Opium War: Battle of Chinhai – British capture a Chinese garrison.
 * 13 October – First Opium War: British occupy Ningbo.
 * 27 October – Anglican clergyman Richard Sibthorp becomes the first Tractarian to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, by Nicholas Wiseman at St Mary's College, Oscott (he reconverts two years later).
 * 30 October – a fire at the Tower of London destroys its Grand Armoury and causes a quarter of a million pounds worth of damage.
 * 13 November – surgeon James Braid attends his first demonstration of animal magnetism, which leads to his study of the subject he eventually calls hypnotism.
 * 23 December – First Anglo-Afghan War: at a meeting with the Afghan general Akbar Khan, the diplomat Sir William Hay Macnaghten is shot dead at close quarters.

Undated

 * Antarctic explorer James Clark Ross additionally discovers the Ross Sea, Victoria Land and Mount Terror.
 * Chemical Society of London founded by Thomas Graham.
 * Ulster Canal completed.

Ongoing events

 * First Opium War (1839–1842)
 * First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842)

Publications

 * W. Harrison Ainsworth's novel Old St. Paul's: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire (serialised in The Sunday Times, 3 January – 26 December).
 * Thomas Carlyle's lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History.
 * Serialisation of Charles Dickens's novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty.
 * Mrs Gore's novel Cecil, or Adventures of a Coxcomb.
 * John Henry Newman's Tract 90 (Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles, dated 25 January).
 * Augustus Pugin's lectures The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture.
 * Samuel Warren's novel Ten Thousand a Year.
 * Vocal Melodies of Scotland, containing the first publication of the song "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond".
 * The Gardeners' Chronicle launched.
 * The Jewish Chronicle launched; the first Jewish newspaper in the UK, it will be the oldest continuously published in the world when it ceases publication in 2020 (12 November).

Births

 * 25 January – Jackie Fisher, admiral (died 1920)
 * 28 January – Henry Morton Stanley, explorer and journalist (died 1904)
 * 9 November – King Edward VII (died 1910)
 * William George Aston, consular official (died 1911)

Deaths

 * 2 February – Olinthus Gregory, mathematician (born 1774)
 * 12 February – Astley Cooper, surgeon and anatomist (born 1768)
 * 17 February – Joseph Chitty, lawyer and legal writer (born 1775)
 * 22 April – Edward Draper, army officer and colonial administrator (born 1776)
 * 20 May – Joseph Blanco White, theologian (born 1775)
 * 1 June – Sir David Wilkie, Scottish painter (born 1785)
 * 3 July – Rosemond Mountain, actress and singer (born 1780s?)
 * 24 August – Theodore Hook, author (born 1788)
 * 1 December – George Birkbeck, doctor, academic and philanthropist (born 1776)
 * 23 December – Sir William Hay Macnaghten, Anglo-Indian diplomat (born 1793)