1890 in the United Kingdom

Events from the year 1890 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

Events

4 January – first edition of the Daily Graphic, the first British 'picture paper'.
11 January – the British government delivers an ultimatum to Portugal forcing the retreat of Portuguese military forces from land between Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola.
6 February – an underground explosion at Llanerch Colliery, Abersychan in Monmouthshire kills 176.
15 February – Kent Coalfield located.
4 March – the Forth Bridge in Scotland opens to rail traffic. It is in length with 2 cantilever spans of making it the longest bridge in Britain and the bridge with the greatest cantilever span in the world.
27 March – Preston North End finish the second season of the Football League as title winners once again.
29 March – Blackburn Rovers win their fourth FA Cup with a 6–1 victory over Sheffield Wednesday in the final at Kennington Oval, London.
12 May – the first official County Championship cricket match begins in Bristol. Yorkshire beat Gloucestershire by eight wickets.
15 May – new elected county councils in Scotland, created by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889, take up their powers. The County of Edinburgh formally adopts the title Midlothian; the formerly administratively separate counties of Ross and Cromarty are merged; and the Shetland county council formally adopts the spelling Zetland.
28 June – the Baseball Ground is opened in Derby to serve one of eight teams competing in a new national baseball league.
1 July – the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty is signed between the United Kingdom and Germany: Britain cedes sovereignty of the Heligoland archipelago to Germany in return for protectorates over Wituland and the Sultanate of Zanzibar in east Africa.
21 July – Battersea Bridge over the River Thames opens in London.
7–15 September – Southampton Dock strike.
8–11 September – royal baccarat scandal: in a house party at Tranby Croft in Yorkshire attended by the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, an army officer is accused of cheating in an illegal gambling game, giving rise to an 1891 trial for slander.
20 October – explorer of Africa Richard Francis Burton dies of a heart attack in Trieste, aged 69.
22 October – colony of Western Australia granted self-governing status.
November
* Baring crisis, a financial panic precipitated by the need to guarantee Barings Bank's risky debts in Argentina.
* Scotland Yard, headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service, moves to a building on London's Victoria Embankment, as New Scotland Yard.
4 November – London's City & South London Railway, the first deep-level underground railway in the world, opens. It runs a distance of between the City of London and Stockwell.
9 November – Royal Navy torpedo cruiser is shipwrecked off Camariñas in Spain with the loss of 173 out of her crew of 176.
17 November – Captain Willy O'Shea divorces his wife, Kitty, for adultery; Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, is named as co-respondent.
21 November – Edward King (bishop of Lincoln) is convicted in a special ecclesiastical court of using ritualistic practices in Anglican worship, although on a majority of counts the court finds in his favour.
18 December – British East Africa Company takes control of Uganda.

Undated

Construction of the first large-scale electrical power station, at Deptford.
Blackwall Buildings, Whitechapel, noted philanthropic housing, is built in the East End of London.
Construction begins of Britain's first council housing at Arnold Cross, Shoreditch in the East End of London.
The Rhymers' Club, a group of poets gathered around W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys, begins to meet informally at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, London.

Publications

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four.
James George Frazer's study in religion, The Golden Bough, volume 1.
Rudyard Kipling's novel The Light that Failed.
Arthur Machen's novella The Great God Pan.
Alfred Marshall's textbook Principles of Economics.
William Morris's utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere.
Oscar Wilde's only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Births

2 January – Madoline Thomas, actress
14 January – Arthur Holmes, geologist
30 January – Stewart Menzies, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service
14 February – Nina Hamnett, painter
17 February – Ronald Fisher, statistician and geneticist
18 February - Ishobel Ross, nurse and diarist
25 February – Myra Hess, pianist
20 March – Owen Williams, civil engineer
31 March – William Lawrence Bragg, physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
15 April – Percy Shaw, inventor
16 April – Fred Root, cricketer
23 May – Herbert Marshall, actor
16 June – Stan Laurel, comic film actor
26 July – David Margesson, politician
15 September – Agatha Christie, detective fiction writer
19 September – Montague Dawson, maritime painter
24 September – A. P. Herbert, comic writer and independent politician
1 October – Stanley Holloway, actor, comedian, singer and poet
17 October – Roy Kilner, cricketer
15 November – Richmal Crompton, writer
22 November – Harry Pollitt, communist politician
24 November – Ernest Bader, businessman and philanthropist
3 December – Walter H. Thompson, Winston Churchill's bodyguard
5 December – David Bomberg, painter
30 December – Lanoe Hawker, fighter pilot
31 December – Bentley Purchase, coroner

Deaths

11 April – Joseph Merrick, pathological curiosity
7 May – James Nasmyth, engineer
2 June – Sir George Burns, Scottish shipowner
18 July – Lydia Becker, suffragette
20 July
*David Davies, Welsh industrialist
*Sir Richard Wallace, 1st Baronet, art collector
11 August – John Henry Newman, Roman Catholic Cardinal, canonised
30 August – Marianne North, botanical artist
4 October – Catherine Booth, Mother of The Salvation Army
20 October – Sir Richard Francis Burton, explorer
12 December – Sir Joseph Boehm, sculptor