Events from the year 1841 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (Whig) (until 30 August); Robert Peel (Conservative) (starting 30 August)
• Foreign Secretary – Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (until 2 September) George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen (starting 2 September)
• Parliament – 13th (until 23 June), 14th (starting 19 August)

Events

• 4 January – City of Dublin Steam Packet Company SS Thames is wrecked on the Western Rocks, Isles of Scilly, with the loss of 61 of the 65 on board;^[1] at least 20 other ships run aground round the British Isles today.
• 20 January – Convention of Chuenpi agreed between Charles Elliot and Qishan of the Qing dynasty.
• 26 January – the United Kingdom formally occupies Hong Kong.
• 27 January – the active volcano Mount Erebus in Antarctica is discovered and named by James Clark Ross.^[2]
• 28 January – Ross discovers the "Victoria Barrier", later known as the Ross Ice Shelf.
• February – H. Fox Talbot obtains a patent for the calotype process in photography.^[3]
• 10 February – Penny Red postage stamp replaces the Penny Black.^[4]
• 20 February – the Governor Fenner, carrying emigrants to America, sinks off Holyhead with the loss of 123 lives.
• 1 March – opening throughout of the Manchester and Leeds Railway, the first to cross the Pennines.^[5]
• 4 March – first performance of Dion Boucicault's comedy London Assurance, presented by Charles Mathews at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.
• March – Richard Beard opens England's first commercial photographic studio in London, producing daguerreotype portraits.^[6]
• by April – Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew first opens to the public^[7] and William Hooker appointed director.
• 3 May
  • New Zealand becomes a separate British colony,^[8] having previously been administered as part of the Colony of New South Wales.
  • London Library opens in Pall Mall.^[7]
• 6 June (Sunday)
  • United Kingdom Census held, the first to record names and approximate ages of every household member and to be administered nationally.
  • Marian Hughes becomes the first woman to take religious vows in communion with the Anglican Province of Canterbury since the Reformation, making them privately to E. B. Pusey in Oxford.^[9]
• 7 June – Lord Melbourne loses a vote of no confidence against his government.
• 21 June – St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham, dedicated as a Roman Catholic church.^[10]
• 29 June–22 July – general election – Sir Robert Peel's Conservatives take control of the House of Commons.
• 30 June – Great Western Railway completed throughout between London and Bristol.^[11]
• 5 July – Thomas Cook arranges his first excursion, taking 570 temperance campaigners on the Midland Counties Railway from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough.^[8][12]
• 17 July – first edition of the humorous magazine Punch published.^[13]
• 26 July – the proprietors of The Skerries Lighthouse off Anglesey, the last privately owned light in the British Isles, are awarded £444,984 in compensation for its sale to Trinity House.^[14]
• 28 August – Melbourne resigns as Prime Minister; replaced by Robert Peel.^[7]
• 2 September – reconsecration of Leeds Parish Church after reconstruction.^[15]
• 21 September – the London and Brighton Railway is opened throughout.^[16]
• 24 September – United Kingdom annexes Sarawak from Brunei; James Brooke is appointed rajah.
• 10 October – First Opium War: Battle of Chinhai – British capture a Chinese garrison.
• 13 October – First Opium War: British occupy Ningbo.
• 27 October – Anglican clergyman Richard Sibthorp becomes the first Tractarian to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, by Nicholas Wiseman at St Mary's College, Oscott (he reconverts two years later).
• 30 October – a fire at the Tower of London destroys its Grand Armoury and causes a quarter of a million pounds worth of damage.^[17]
• 13 November – surgeon James Braid attends his first demonstration of animal magnetism, which leads to his study of the subject he eventually calls hypnotism.
• 23 December – First Anglo-Afghan War: at a meeting with the Afghan general Akbar Khan, the diplomat Sir William Hay Macnaghten is shot dead at close quarters.

Undated

• Antarctic explorer James Clark Ross additionally discovers the Ross Sea, Victoria Land and Mount Terror.
• Chemical Society of London founded by Thomas Graham.
• Ulster Canal completed.^[18]

Ongoing events

• First Opium War (1839–1842)
• First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842)

Publications

• W. Harrison Ainsworth's novel Old St. Paul's: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire (serialised in The Sunday Times, 3 January – 26 December).
• Thomas Carlyle's lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History.
• Serialisation of Charles Dickens's novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty.
• Mrs Gore's novel Cecil, or Adventures of a Coxcomb.
• John Henry Newman's Tract 90 (Remarks on Certain Passages in the Thirty-Nine Articles, dated 25 January).
• Augustus Pugin's lectures The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture.
• Samuel Warren's novel Ten Thousand a Year.^[19]
• Vocal Melodies of Scotland, containing the first publication of the song "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond".
• The Gardeners' Chronicle launched.
• The Jewish Chronicle launched; the first Jewish newspaper in the UK,^[8] it will be the oldest continuously published in the world when it ceases publication in 2020 (12 November).^[20]

Births

• 25 January – Jackie Fisher, admiral (died 1920)
• 28 January – Henry Morton Stanley, explorer and journalist (died 1904)
• 9 November – King Edward VII (died 1910)^[21]
• William George Aston, consular official (died 1911)

Deaths

• 2 February – Olinthus Gregory, mathematician (born 1774)
• 12 February – Astley Cooper, surgeon and anatomist (born 1768)
• 17 February – Joseph Chitty, lawyer and legal writer (born 1775)
• 22 April – Edward Draper, army officer and colonial administrator (born 1776)
• 20 May – Joseph Blanco White, theologian (born 1775)
• 1 June – Sir David Wilkie, Scottish painter (born 1785)
• 3 July – Rosemond Mountain, actress and singer (born 1780s?)
• 24 August – Theodore Hook, author (born 1788)
• 1 December – George Birkbeck, doctor, academic and philanthropist (born 1776)
• 23 December – Sir William Hay Macnaghten, Anglo-Indian diplomat (born 1793)