1884 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – William Ewart Gladstone
• Parliament – 22nd

  Events

• 4 January – the Fabian Society is founded in London.
• 5 January – Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Princess Ida has its première at the Savoy Theatre, London.
• 18 January – Dr William Price attempts to cremate his dead baby son, Iesu Grist, at Llantrisant. Later tried at Cardiff Assizes and acquitted on the grounds that cremation is not contrary to law, he is thus able to carry out the ceremony on 14 March.
• 26 January – 29 March: the first British Home Championship is held between the football teams of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
• 1 February – first fascicle of what will become the Oxford English Dictionary is published.
• 5 February – Derby County Football Club is founded in England.
• 15 February – Emma Keyse is murdered and John 'Babbacombe' Lee is suspected.
• 26 February – Fenian dynamite campaign: A bomb explodes in the left-luggage office at London Victoria station; bombs left at other London railway stations are defused.
• 13 March – the Siege of Khartoum begins in the Mahdist War: General Charles Gordon is besieged in the Sudan.
• 22 April – Colchester earthquake: four die in the UK's most destructive earthquake.
• 29 May – Oscar Wilde marries Constance Lloyd in London.
• 30 May – Fenian dynamite campaign: Three bombs explode in London: at the headquarters of the Criminal Investigation Department and the Metropolitan Police Service's Special Irish Branch; in the basement of the Carlton Club ; and outside the home of Conservative MP Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn; ten people are injured. A fourth bomb planted at the foot of Nelson's Column fails to explode.
• 1 July – First International Forestry Exhibition opens in Edinburgh.
• 8 July – the NSPCC is founded as the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
• 16 July – A locomotive axle failure caused the derailment of an express passenger train from Manchester for London at Penistone. Twenty-four passengers were killed.
• 28 September – the Marks & Spencer department store chain starts life as Michael Marks’ market stall in Leeds Kirkgate Market, Yorkshire.
• 13 October – International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. fixes the Greenwich meridian as the world's prime meridian.
• 18 October – University College of North Wales, Bangor founded.
• 1 November – Leicester City F.C. play their first match, as Leicester Fosse Football Club.
• 2 November – the "Home Office Baby" is delivered to the Home Office.
• 2 November – Fourteen people were killed when some of the audience at the Star theatre, Glasgow panicked following a false fire alarm.
• 4 December – Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens are convicted of murder in the survival cannibalism case of R v. Dudley and Stephens.
• 6 December – Representation of the People Act extends the franchise uniformly across the U.K. to all male tenants paying a £10 rental or occupying land to that value, and restricts multiple voting.
• 9 December – Dudley and Stephens receive the mandatory death penalty with a recommendation for clemency and on 13 December are told that their penalties have been commuted to six months' imprisonment.

  Publications

• A New English Dictionary on historical principles, part 1, edited by James A. H. Murray.
• Arthur Conan Doyle's story based on the disappearance of the Mary Celeste, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement".
• Arnold Toynbee's lectures .

  Births

• 18 January – Arthur Ransome, children's author and journalist
• 12 February – Norman Jewson, Arts and Crafts architect
• 13 March – Sir Hugh Walpole, novelist
• 1 April – J. C. Squire, writer and critic
• 10 May – Olga Petrova, English-born actress
• 5 June – Ivy Compton-Burnett, novelist
• 13 June – Gerald Gardner, founder of the Wiccan religion
• 21 June
• * Claude Auchinleck, field marshal
• * Gordon Lowe, British tennis player
• 29 June
• * William Whitworth, admiral
• * Francis Brett Young, novelist
• 19 July – Maurice Nicoll, psychiatrist
• 23 July – Dilly Knox, cryptanalyst
• 10 August – Douglas Macmillan, founder of Macmillan Cancer Support
• 6 October – MacDonald Gill, designer
• 25 November – Alexander Cadogan, diplomat
• 17 December – Alison Uttley, children's writer
• 19 December – Stanley Unwin, publisher

  Deaths

• 8 January – Eugenius Birch, pier engineer
• 4 February – Lord Edward Thynne, politician and aristocrat
• 17 February – Charles Stuart Calverley, poet and wit
• 1 March – Isaac Todhunter, mathematician
• 10 March – William Blanchard Jerrold, journalist
• 28 March – Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, member of the royal family
• 1 April – Marie Litton, actress
• 5 April – John Wisden, cricketer, creator of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
• 11 April – Charles Reade, novelist
• 29 April – Sir Michael Costa, conductor
• 29 May – Sir Henry Bartle Frere, colonial administrator
• 15 July – Henry Wellesley, 1st Earl Cowley, diplomat
• 23 July – Anna Mary Howitt, writer, painter and feminist
• 6 August – Robert Spear Hudson, English businessman and philanthropist
• 10 September – George Bentham, botanist
• 6 November
• * Henry Fawcett, statesman, economist and Postmaster General
• * George Vane-Tempest, 5th Marquess of Londonderry, industrialist
• 3 December – Jane Lundie Bonar, Scottish hymnwriter
• 4 December – Alice Mary Smith, composer