1881 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – William Ewart Gladstone

Events

• 1 January – postal orders issued for the first time in Britain.
• 14 January – Fenian dynamite campaign in Britain begins: A bomb explodes at a military barracks in Salford, Lancashire; a young boy is killed.
• 17–18 January – blizzard over southern parts of Britain.
• 18 January – First Boer War: British forces defeated at the Battle of Laing's Nek.
• 8 February – First Boer War: British forces defeated at the Battle of Schuinshoogte.
• 27 February – First Boer War: British forces defeated at the Battle of Majuba Hill.
• 1 March – the Cunard Line's, the first steel transatlantic liner, is launched at Clydebank.
• 12 March – Andrew Watson of Glasgow's Queen's Park F.C. captains the Scotland national football team in a 6-1 victory against England, becoming the world's first mixed race international Association football player.
• 27 March – in Basingstoke, antagonism between the Salvation Army and supporters of the licensed trade becomes so great that the Riot Act is read and troops are called in to restore order.
• 31 March – Edward Rudolf founds the 'Church of England Central Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays'.
• 3 April – census in the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of the population are urbanised; one-seventh live in London.
• 5 April – the Treaty of Pretoria gives the Boers self-government in the Transvaal under a theoretical British oversight.
• 9 April – Old Carthusians F.C. beat Old Etonians 3–0 in the FA Cup Final at The Oval, the last time it will be played between two amateur sides.
• 18 April – the Natural History Museum is opened in London.
• 19 April – Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, becomes the Conservative leader in the House of Lords following the death of Benjamin Disraeli.
• 23 April – first performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience, a satire on aestheticism, at the Opera Comique in London.
• 27 April – British troops leave Afghanistan.
• 1 May – Childers Reforms of the British Army begin to reorganise the infantry into multi-battalion regiments, coming into effect on 1 July with the issue of General Order 70.
• 7 June – the Democratic Federation, predecessor of the Social Democratic Federation, established as Britain's first organised socialist political party by Henry Hyndman, holds its first meeting.
• 14–20 July – International Anarchist Congress held in London.
• 26 July – first publication of the London Evening News.
• 16 August – a tribunal is set up under the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 to examine excessive rents.
• 27 August – the Sunday Closing (Wales) Act prohibits the sale of alcohol in Wales on a Sunday. This is the first act of Parliament of the United Kingdom, Great Britain or England since the 1542 Act of Union between England and Wales whose application is restricted to Wales.
• 26 September – Godalming becomes the first town in England to have its streets illuminated by electric light.
• 10 October – Richard D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theatre opens in London, the world's first public building to be fully lit by electricity, using Joseph Swan's incandescent light bulbs. The run of Patience transfers from the Opera Comique. The stage is first lit electrically on 28 December.
• 13 October – Charles Stewart Parnell imprisoned for to his part in land agitation in Ireland.
• 14 October – great gale across the country; in the Eyemouth disaster, a severe storm strikes the Berwickshire coast of Scotland and 189 fishermen die.
• 16 October – The People Sunday newspaper founded.
• 22 October – Tit-Bits weekly digest magazine founded by George Newnes.

Publications

• Henry James' novel The Portrait of a Lady.
• Talbot Baines Reed's school story The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's begins serialisation in The Boy's Own Paper.
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Ballads and Sonnets.
• Joseph Henry Shorthouse's novel John Inglesant.
• Robert Louis Stevenson's children's adventure novel Treasure Island begins serialization in Young Folks as by "Captain George North".
• New Testament in the Revised Version of The Bible.

In fiction

• Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H. Watson first meet at Bart's Hospital, London, prior to the events narrated in Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet commencing on 4 March.

Births

• 9 January – Lascelles Abercrombie, poet and critic
• 28 January – Ruby M. Ayres, romance novelist
• 13 February – Eleanor Farjeon, author of children's literature
• 21 February – Kenneth J. Alford, soldier and composer
• 9 March – Ernest Bevin, labour leader, politician and statesman
• 10 March – Thomas Quinlan, operatic impresario
• 25 March – Mary Webb, novelist
• 25 June – Robert Vansittart, diplomat
• 1 August – Rose Macaulay, novelist
• 2 August – Ethel M. Dell, romantic fiction writer
• 6 August – Alexander Fleming, bacteriological researcher, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• 19 August – Kingsley Wood, politician
• 20 August – Edgar Guest, poet
• 5 September – Victor Grayson, socialist politician
• 12 September – Daniel Jones, phonetician
• 16 September – Clive Bell, art critic
• 17 September – Alfred Carpenter, naval officer, recipient of the Victoria Cross
• 11 October – Lewis Fry Richardson, mathematical physicist
• 15 October
• * William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury
• * P. G. Wodehouse, comic writer

Deaths

• 24 January
• * Frances Stackhouse Acton, antiquarian and botanist
• * James Collinson, Pre-Raphaelite painter
• 5 February – Thomas Carlyle, writer and historian
• 19 April – Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• 24 May – Samuel Palmer, watercolour landscape painter
• 30 July – George Meads, cricketer
• 11 August – Jane Digby, adventurer
• 18 September - Joseph Higginson, British Royal Marine in the Napoleonic Wars,
• 14 December – Decimus Burton, architect and garden designer
• 18 December – George Edmund Street, architect