1802 in the United Kingdom

1802 in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland:

Other years

1800 | 1801 | 1802 | 1803 | 1804

Events from the year 1802 in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Incumbents

• Monarch - George III
• Prime Minister - Henry Addington (Tory)

Events

• 27 March - Treaty of Amiens between France and United Kingdom ends the War of the Second Coalition.
• 15 April - William and Dorothy Wordsworth, walking by Ullswater, see a host of daffodils which inspire his best-known poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, first written two years later.
• 19 April - Joseph Grimaldi first presents his white-faced clown character "Joey", at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London.
• 5 July - André-Jacques Garnerin and Edward Hawke Locker make a 17-mile (27.4-km) balloon flight from Lord's Cricket Ground in St John's Wood, London, to Chingford in just over 15 minutes.
• 5 July-28 August - General election brings victory for the Tories led by Henry Addington.
• 27 August - West India Docks, first commercial docks in London, open.
• 3 September - William Wordsworth's sonnet "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" written.
• 5 November - Marc Isambard Brunel begins installation of his blockmaking machinery at Portsmouth Block Mills.
• 13 November - The first play to be explicitly called a melodrama ("melodrame") is performed in London, Thomas Holcroft's Gothic A Tale of Mystery (an unacknowledged translation of de Pixerécourt's Cœlina, ou, l'enfant du mystère) at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.
• 16 November - Arrest in London of ringleaders of the Despard Plot: a failed conspiracy by revolutionaries led by Colonel Edward Despard, a radical Anglo-Irish former British Army officer and colonial official, apparently intended to assassinate King George III and seize key positions such as the Bank of England and Tower of London as a prelude to a wider uprising.
• 2 December - The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (2 June) comes into effect, regulating conditions for child labour in factories. Although poorly enforced, it pioneers a series of Factory Acts.

Ongoing

• Anglo-Spanish War, 1796–1808

Undated

• Marie Tussaud first exhibits her wax sculptures in London, having been commissioned during the Reign of Terror in France to make death masks of the victims.
• London Fever Hospital founded.
• Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, admits its first intake.
• Solomon Hirschell elected rabbi of the Great Synagogue of London, becoming recognised as chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.
• Sir William Herschel first uses the term binary star to refer to a star which revolves around another star.
• Thomas Wedgwood discovers a method of creating photographs using silver nitrate.
• George Bodley of Exeter patents the first enclosed kitchen stove.
• Goodwood Racecourse laid out.

Publications

• 10 October - The reforming quarterly The Edinburgh Review is first published.
• Walter Scott's collection of Scottish ballads The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

Births

• 3 January - Charles Pelham Villiers, politician (died 1898)
• 6 February - Charles Wheatstone, scientist and inventor (died 1875)
• 7 March - Edwin Landseer, animal painter (died 1873)
• 10 July - Robert Chambers, Scottish author and publisher (died 1871)
• 23 December - Sara Coleridge, scholar (died 1852)
• 10 October - Hugh Miller, Scottish geologist (suicide 1856)

Deaths

• 21 January - John Moore, Scottish-born physician and writer (born 1729)
• 28 January - Joseph Wall, army officer, colonial governor and murderer (born 1737)
• 2 February - Welbore Ellis, 1st Baron Mendip, statesman (born 1713)
• 18 April - Erasmus Darwin, physician and botanist (born 1731)
• 9 November - Thomas Girtin, watercolourist (born 1775)
• 15 November - George Romney, portrait painter (born 1734)