1854 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen
• Parliament – 16th

  Events

• 21 January – the iron clipper runs aground on Lambay Island on her maiden voyage out of Liverpool with the loss of at least 300 of around 650 on board.
• 13 February – Cheltenham Ladies' College admits its first pupils.
• 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 has conquered, Moldavia and Wallachia.
• 1 March – Inman Line's sets out from Liverpool on passage to the United States with 480 on board; she is lost without trace.
• 11 March – Royal Navy fleet sails from Britain under Vice Admiral Sir Charles Napier.
• 21 March–end April – Giuseppe Garibaldi visits Tyneside.
• 28 March – United Kingdom declares war on Russia thus joining the Crimean War.
• 1 April – Hard Times begins serialisation in Charles Dickens's magazine, Household Words.
• 26 April – 'National Day of Fast and Humiliation' held, in support of the Crimean War.
• 4 May – Religious Tract Society publishes first issue of The Sunday at Home, 'a family magazine for Sabbath reading'.
• May – Holman Hunt first exhibits the original version of his painting The Light of the World, together with The Awakening Conscience, at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
• 10 June – the Crystal Palace reopens in Sydenham, south London with life-size dinosaur models in the grounds.
• 21 June – Crimean War: In the First Battle of Bomarsund in Åland, Royal Navy mate Charles Davis Lucas throws a live Russian artillery shell overboard before it explodes, for which incident he will be the first to be retroactively awarded the Victoria Cross in 1857.
• 22 July – discovery of the asteroid 30 Urania by John Russell Hind.
• August – the Oxford University Act 1854 reforms the University of Oxford, opening it to undergraduates outside the Church of England by abolishing the requirement to undergo a religious test or take the Oath of Supremacy.
• 10 August
• * Youthful Offenders Act limits prison sentences for under-16s and extends the system of reformatory schools for them.
• * Merchant Shipping Act 1854 introduces official numbers for ships, revises calculations of tonnage, vests management of Scottish lighthouses in the Northern Lighthouse Board and provides for rewards to lifesavers leading to creation of the Sea Gallantry Medal.
• 12 August – prorogation of Parliament, the last time this is carried out by the monarch in person, and the last time royal assent to its Acts is given in person.
• 16 August – Crimean War: second Battle of Bomarsund – after a three-day bombardment, Russian troops on the island of Bomarsund in Åland surrender to combined French and British forces.
• 27 August – Alfred Wills and party set out for the first ascent of the Wetterhorn in Switzerland, regarded as the start of the "golden age of alpinism".
• 31 August – 8 September – an epidemic of cholera in London kills 10,000. Dr John Snow traces the source of one outbreak to a single water pump, validating his theory that cholera is water-borne, and forming the starting point for epidemiology.
• 20 September – Crimean War: at the Alma, the Franco-British alliance wins the first battle of the war.
• 6 October – the great fire of Newcastle and Gateshead is ignited by a spectacular explosion.
• 17 October – Crimean War: Siege of Sevastopol begins.
• 21 October – Florence Nightingale leaves England with 38 other trained volunteer nurses for Selimiye Barracks at Scutari in the Ottoman Empire, where they arrive the following month to care for British Army troops invalided from the Crimean War.
• 25 October – Crimean War: the Battle of Balaclava occurs, overall a victory for the allies, but including the disastrous cavalry Charge of the Light Brigade.
• 5 November – Crimean War: Russians defeated at the Battle of Inkerman.
• 14 November – Great Storm of 1854 in the Black Sea: 19 British transport and other ships supporting the Crimean War are wrecked with the loss of at least 287 men.
• 30 November – SS Nile is wrecked on The Stones reef off Godrevy Head on the north Cornwall coast, with the loss of all on board - at least 40.
• 4 December – the Distinguished Conduct Medal is instituted by Royal warrant, the first regulated military decoration available to other ranks of the British Army.
• 20 December – in the case of Talbot v Laroche, pioneer of photography William Fox Talbot fails in asserting that the collodion process infringes his calotype patent. The case allows more freedom for other early photographers to experiment and accelerates the development of photography.

  Unknown dates

• Rowland Hill becomes Secretary of the Post Office; programme of purpose-built Post Offices initiated.
• Northcote–Trevelyan Report on the organisation of the permanent civil service is published.
• St George's Hall, Liverpool, opens.
• Prudential Assurance begins selling the relatively new concept of industrial branch insurance policies to the working classes for premiums as low as one penny through agents acting as door to door salesmen.
• Brown and Polson's patent cornflour first produced, in Paisley.
• Cuddesdon College is established by Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, as a diocesan Anglican seminary.
• George Airy calculates the mean density of the Earth by measuring the gravity in a coal mine in South Shields.

  Publications

• George Boole's influential work on algebraic logic An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities.
• Charles Dickens' novel Hard Times.
• Alfred Tennyson's poem The Charge of the Light Brigade.
• William Makepeace Thackeray's novel The Rose and the Ring.

  Births

• 4 March – Napier Shaw, meteorologist
• 31 March – Dugald Clerk, mechanical engineer
• 9 June – Weedon Grossmith, writer
• 13 June – Charles A. Parsons, inventor
• 18 July – Montague Gluckstein, caterer
• 16 October – Oscar Wilde, writer
• 17 October – Queenie Newall, archer
• 24 December – Thomas Stevens, cyclist

  Deaths

• 8 January
• * William Carr Beresford, 1st Viscount Beresford, general and politician
• * Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy, clockmaker
• 17 February – John Martin, painter
• 25 February – Ann Walker, landowner, philanthropist
• 6 March – Charles William Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, soldier, politician and nobleman
• 13 March – Thomas Noon Talfourd, jurist
• 3 April – John Wilson, writer
• 15 April – Arthur Aikin, chemist and mineralogist
• 29 April – Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, general
• 25 May – Hyde Parker, admiral
• 1 November – Charles Geach, industrialist, banker and politician
• 12 November – Charles Kemble, actor
• 18 November – Edward Forbes, naturalist
• 25 November – John Gibson Lockhart, writer and editor