1844 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Robert Peel
• Parliament – 14th

  Events

• 28 February – the Grand National at Aintree is won by the 5/1 joint favourite Discount.
• 11 April – initiation of the Ragged Schools Union.
• 11 May – major fire at Lyme Regis.
• 6 June – George Williams founds the Young Men's Christian Association in London.
• 15 June – Factory Act imposes a maximum 12-hour working day for women, and a maximum 6-hour day for children aged 6 to 13.
• 19 July – Bank Charter Act restricts powers of British banks other than the Bank of England to issue banknotes of the pound sterling.
• 9 August – imprisonment for debt abolished in England.
• 21 & 27 August – consecration of two new major urban Roman Catholic churches, both designed by Augustus Pugin, which will in the 1850s be elevated to cathedral status: St Mary's Church, Newcastle upon Tyne and St Barnabas Church, Nottingham.
• 28 September – a blackdamp explosion at Haswell Colliery in the Durham Coalfield kills 95, with just four survivors.
• 8 October – Louis-Phillipe arrives in Portsmouth
• 20 October – Counties Act 1844 comes into effect, eliminating many outliers or exclaves of counties in England and Wales for civil purposes.
• 28 October – the Royal Exchange in London opened by Queen Victoria.
• 21 December – the Rochdale Pioneers, usually considered the first successful cooperative enterprise, open their store in Rochdale, forming the basis for the modern cooperative movement.

  Undated

• Henry Hardinge, 1st Viscount Hardinge appointed as Governor-General of India.
• Winsford rock salt mine opens in Cheshire; by 2014 it will be Britain's oldest working mine.
• Ring of bells installed at St John the Evangelist's Church, Kirkham, said to be the first peal rung in an English Roman Catholic church since the Reformation.
• "Surplice riots" in Exeter and London break out in opposition to supposed Catholicisation of the Church of England.
• King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony makes an informal summer tour of Britain.

  Publications

• Robert Chambers' anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which paves the way for acceptance of Darwin's The Origin of Species.
• Charles Dickens' novel Martin Chuzzlewit and his Christmas novella The Chimes.
• Benjamin Disraeli's novel Coningsby.
• Henry Fox Talbot's book The Pencil of Nature, the first illustrated with photographs from a camera.
• William Makepeace Thackeray's novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon.

  Births

• 3 May – Richard D'Oyly Carte, theatrical impresario
• 22 July – William Archibald Spooner, scholar and Anglican priest
• 28 July – Gerard Manley Hopkins, English poet
• 6 August – Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, second son of Queen Victoria
• 29 August – Edward Carpenter, Socialist poet
• 23 October – Robert Bridges, English poet
• 25 October – Arthur William à Beckett, journalist
• 1 December – Alexandra of Denmark, queen of Edward VII

  Deaths

• 23 January – Francis Burdett, politician
• 15 February – Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• 27 July – John Dalton, chemist and physicist
• 2 November – Augustus Wall Callcott, landscape painter
• 23 November – Thomas James Henderson, astronomer