1854 in the United Kingdom

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Events from the year 1854 in the United Kingdom.

[edit] Incumbents

• Monarch - Victoria of the United Kingdom
• Prime Minister - George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, Peelite

[edit] Events

• 21 January - Loss of the RMS Tayleur - 380 drowned, later dubbed "the first Titanic".
• 17 February - The British recognise the independence of the Orange Free State.
• 27 February - Britain sends Russia an ultimatum to withdraw from two Ottoman provinces it had conquered, Moldavia and Wallachia.
• 11 March - Royal Navy fleet sails from Britain under Vice Admiral Sir Charles Napier.
• 28 March - United Kingdom declares war on Russia — Crimean War begins.^[1]
• 1 April - Hard Times begins serialisation in Charles Dickens magazine, Household Words.
• 21 June - In the battle at Bomarsund in Åland, Royal Navy mate Charles D. Lucas throws a live Russian artillery shell overboard by hand before it explodes — the incident is the first that will be retroactively awarded the Victoria Cross in 1857.
• 22 July - Discovery of the asteroid 30 Urania by John Russell Hind.
• 16 August - Russian troops in the island of Bomarsund in Åland surrender to French-British troops.
• 20 September - Crimean War: At the Alma, the French-British alliance wins the first battle of the war.
• 6 October - The great fire of Newcastle and Gateshead is ignited by a spectacular explosion.
• 21 October - Florence Nightingale leaves for Crimea with 38 other nurses.
• 25 October - Crimean War: The Battle of Balaclava occurs, overall a victory for the allies, but it included the disastrous cavalry Charge of the Light Brigade, from which only 200 of 700 men survive.^[1]
• 5 November - Crimean War: Russians defeated at the Battle of Inkerman.^[1]
• 20 December - In the case of Talbot v. Laroche, pioneer of photography William Fox Talbot failed in asserting that the collodion process infringed his calotype patent. The case allowed more freedom for other early photographers to experiment and accelerated the development of photography.^[2]

[edit] Unknown dates

• An epidemic of cholera in London kills 10,000. Dr John Snow traces the source of one outbreak (that killed 500) to a single water pump, validating his theory that cholera is water-borne, and forming the starting point for epidemiology.
• George Airy calculates the mean density of the Earth by measuring the gravity in a coal mine in South Shields.

[edit] Publications

• George Boole's influential work on logic, The Laws of Thought.^[1]
• Alfred Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade.^[1]
• Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times.
• William Makepeace Thackeray's novel The Rose and the Ring.

[edit] Births

• 4 March - Napier Shaw, meteorologist (d. 1945)
• 13 June - Charles Algernon Parsons, inventor (d. 1931)
• 16 October - Oscar Wilde, writer (d. 1900)
• 24 December - Thomas Stevens, cyclist (d. 1935)

[edit] Deaths

• 8 January - William Carr Beresford, 1st Viscount Beresford, general and politician (born 1768)
• 17 February - John Martin, painter (born 1789)
• 6 March - Charles William Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, soldier, politician and nobleman (born 1778)
• 13 March - Thomas Noon Talfourd, jurist (born 1795)
• 3 April - John Wilson, writer (born 1785)
• 15 April - Arthur Aikin, chemist and mineralogist (born 1773)
• 29 April - Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, general (born 1768)
• 12 November - Charles Kemble, actor (born 1775)
• 25 November - John Gibson Lockhart, writer and editor (born 1794)

[edit] References