1785 in Great Britain:

Other years

1783 | 1784 | 1785 | 1786 | 1787

Sport

1785 English cricket season

Events from the year 1785 in the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Incumbents

• Monarch - George III of the United Kingdom
• Prime Minister - William Pitt the Younger, Tory

Events

• 1 January The first issue of the Daily Universal Register, later known as The Times, is published in London.^[1]
• 7 January - Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover to Calais, France in a hydrogen gas balloon, becoming the first to cross the English Channel by air.^[1]
• 7 March - James Hutton proposes the theory of uniformitarianism to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.^[2]
• 21 December - Prince of Wales marries Catholic Maria Fitzherbert, secretly, and in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act 1772.^[3]

Undated

• British government establishes a permanent land force in the Eastern Caribbean, based in Barbados
• William Pitt the Younger introduces a Reform Bill to Parliament to abolish the rotten boroughs, but it is defeated.^[4]
• Governor-General of India Warren Hastings charged with maladministration and returns to Britain.^[5]

Publications

• James Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.^[5]
• William Withering's An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses, demonstrating the effects of digitalis.^[6]

Births

• 30 January - Charles Metcalfe, 1st Baron Metcalfe, colonial administrator (died 1846)
• 18 May - John Wilson, writer (died 1854)
• 6 July - William Jackson Hooker, botanist (died 1865)
• 15 August - Thomas de Quincey, writer (died 1859)
• 18 October - Thomas Love Peacock, satirist (died 1866)
• 25 September - George Pinto, composer and keyboard virtuoso (died 1806)
• 18 November - David Wilkie, artist (died 1841)

Deaths

• 19 January - Jonathan Toup, classical scholar and critic (born 1713)
• 23 January - Matthew Stewart, mathematician (born 1717)
• 14 April - William Whitehead, writer (born 1715)
• 30 June - James Oglethorpe, English general and founder of the state of Georgia (born 1696)
• 26 August - George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville, soldier and politician (born 1716)
• 25 November - Richard Glover, poet (born 1712)
• 6 December - Kitty Clive, actress (born 1711)

References

See also