1789 in Great Britain

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III
• Prime Minister – William Pitt the Younger

Events

• 3 February – Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger introduces a Regency Bill to Parliament so that the Prince of Wales may serve as regent for his father George III during a period of mental illness, but the King recovers before the Bill becomes law.
• March – first version of a graphic description of a slave ship issued on behalf of the English Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
• 18 March – Catherine Murphy, a counterfeiter, becomes the last woman in Britain to suffer a sentence of death by burning, at Newgate Prison in London.
• April – Privy Council report on the slave trade published.
• 20 April – first boat passes through the Severn Canal's Sapperton Tunnel near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. At it is the longest tunnel of any kind in England at this date.
• 28 April – Fletcher Christian leads a mutiny on HMS Bounty against Captain William Bligh in Polynesia.
• 12 May – William Wilberforce makes his first major speech in the House of Commons on the abolition of the slave trade.
• 14 June – Mutiny on the Bounty survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 4,000-mile journey in an open boat.
• 28 August – William Herschel discovers Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons.
• 17 September – William Herschel discovers Mimas, another of Saturn's moons.
• 4 November – Richard Price preaches a sermon in London, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, igniting the Revolution Controversy.
• 19 November – Thames and Severn Canal opened throughout, giving through navigation between the Thames and Severn.

Undated

• Charles Dibdin introduces the nautical song Tom Bowling in his London entertainment The Oddities.
• The song The Lass of Richmond Hill, with music by James Hook to words by Leonard McNally, is first performed publicly by Charles Incledon at Vauxhall Gardens in London.
• Rev. Dr. Edmund Cartwright patents his first practical power loom and designs a wool combing machine.
• Andrew Pears introduces Pears soap in London.

Publications

• William Blake's book of poetry Songs of Innocence and of Experience and his first published prophetic book The Book of Thel.
• Erasmus Darwin's poem The Loves of the Plants, a popular rendering of Linnaeus' works.
• Former slave Olaudah Equiano's autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, one of the earliest published works by a black writer.

Births

• 5 January – Thomas Pringle, poet
• 14 July – Timothy Yeats Brown, consul to Genoa
• 19 July – John Martin, painter
• 28 September – Richard Bright, physician, "Father of Nephrology"
• 25 December – Elizabeth Jesser Reid, social reformer
• James Morrison, millionaire retail draper and politician

Deaths

• 1 January – Fletcher Norton, 1st Baron Grantley, politician
• 8 January – Jack Broughton, English boxer
• 23 January – Frances Brooke, writer
• 23 January – John Cleland, novelist
• 26 February – Eclipse, racehorse
• 20 July – David Nelson, botanist on
• 26 November – John Elwes, miser and politician