1839 in Wales

Incumbents

• Prince of Wales – vacant
• Princess of Wales – vacant

  Events

• March – John Frost, former mayor of Newport, is deprived of his position as a magistrate because of his Chartist sympathies.
• 30 April – Chartists riot in Llanidloes and seize control of the town for five days.
• 7 May – Henry Vincent is arrested after addressing a Chartist meeting and taken to prison at Monmouth.
• 13 May – Beginning of the Rebecca Riots.
• 25 July – William Ewart Gladstone marries Catherine Glynne of Hawarden.
• 28 August – Mary Anne Lewis, widow of Cardiff MP Wyndham Lewis, marries Benjamin Disraeli.
• 5 October – Opening of West Bute Dock.
• 4 November – Newport Rising: between 5,000 and 10,000 Chartist sympathisers led by John Frost, many of them coal miners, march on the Westgate Hotel in Newport, Monmouthshire, to liberate Chartist prisoners; around 22 are killed when troops, directed by Thomas Phillips, the mayor, fire on the crowd. This is the last large-scale armed civil rebellion against authority in mainland Britain and sees the most deaths.
• 23 November – Zephaniah Williams, one of the leaders of the Chartist march on Newport, is arrested on board ship at Cardiff.
• date unknown – Sir Thomas Frankland Lewis resigns as chairman of the Poor Law Commission, to be replaced by his son, George Cornewall Lewis.

  Arts and literature

New books

• William Bingley – Excursions in North Wales
• Maria James – Wales and other Poems
• William Williams – Drych Barddonol

  Music

• John Roberts – Hafilah

  Births

• 9 January – Sarah Jane Rees, writer
• 13 February – Robert Bird, politician
• 7 March – Ludwig Mond, German-born industrialist
• 31 March – Thomas Henry Thomas later known as T. H. Thomas, artist
• 24 September – John Neale Dalton, royal chaplain and tutor

  Deaths

• 11 May – "Doctor" John Harries, Cwrt-y-cadno, physician, 54
• 16 May – Edward Clive, 1st Earl of Powis, 84
• 20 May – Rice Rees, historian, 35
• 29 December – Hopkin Bevan, minister and author, 74