1833 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – William IV
• Prime Minister – Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey
• Parliament – 11th

  Events

• 3 January – reassertion of British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands by British forces in the South Atlantic.
• 18 April – over 300 delegates from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland travel to the office of the Prime Minister to call for the immediate abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.
• 25 May – Royal Horticultural Society holds the first flower show in Britain.
• 5 June – Ada Lovelace is introduced to Charles Babbage by Mary Somerville.
• 14 July – John Keble preaches a sermon on "National Apostasy", launching the Oxford Movement within the Church of England.
• 28 August – the Slavery Abolition Act receives Royal Assent, abolishing slavery in most of the British Empire. A £20 million fund is established to compensate slaveowners.
• 29 August – the Factory Act makes it illegal to employ children less than 9 years old in factories and limits child workers of 9 to 13 years of age to a maximum of 9 hours a day.
• 31 August – chartered ship Amphitrite sinks off Boulogne-sur-Mer while undertaking the penal transportation of 108 British female convicts and 12 children from Woolwich to New South Wales with the loss of 133 lives; only 3 crew survive.
• December – Edwin Chadwick introduces the Ten Hours Bill in Parliament.

  Undated

• Bank Notes Act gives Bank of England notes over £5 in value the status of "legal tender" in England and Wales.
• Quakers and Moravians Act allows Quakers and Moravians to substitute an affirmation for a legal oath in accordance with their religious beliefs.
• The Preston Temperance Society is founded by Joseph Livesey, pioneering the temperance movement and teetotalism.
• Laying out of Moor Park, Preston, by the local authority as a public park begins.

  Publications

• First of the Bridgewater Treatises, examining science in relation to God.
• Serialisation of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in Fraser's Magazine.
• Charles Dickens' first published work of fiction, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", first of what will become Sketches by Boz, appears unsigned in the Monthly Magazine.
• Edward Bulwer's novel Godolphin.
• Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer's instructional text The Peep of Day, or, A series of the earliest religious instruction the infant mind is capable of receiving.
• Alfred Tennyson's collection Poems including "The Lady of Shalott".
• Publication of The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge edited by George Long begins.
• William Sandys' collection Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern.

  Births

• 23 January – Sir Lewis Morris, Anglo-Welsh poet
• 28 January – Charles George Gordon, British army officer and administrator
• 27 July – Thomas George Bonney, geologist
• 12 August – Aylmer Spicer Cameron, VC recipient
• 26 August – Henry Fawcett, statesman, economist and Postmaster General
• 28 August – Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Anglo-Welsh artist
• 11 December Francis Anstie, physician and medical researcher
• date unknown – James James, harpist and composer of the Welsh national anthem

  Deaths

• 9 January – Sir Thomas Foley, admiral
• 23 January – Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth, admiral
• 16 April – Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Carnarvon
• 22 April – Richard Trevithick, Cornish-born inventor, mechanical engineer and builder of the first working railway steam locomotive
• 15 May
• * Bewick Bridge, mathematician
• * Edmund Kean, actor
• 2 June – Simon Byrne, prizefighter
• 10 July – George Agar-Ellis, 1st Baron Dover, man of letters
• 29 July – William Wilberforce, abolitionist
• 11 November – James Grant, navigator
• 3 December – Adam Buck, Irish-born neo-classical portraitist and miniature painter