A Regency Era Timeline 1820 in progress

Timeline

Each time I start a year, I have already compiled a list, months ago with about 6000 entered of what happened from 1788 to 1837. My first step now (It took several trials to get this down to a science) is to cut out the specific year I will work on and paste it into its own spreadsheet to work with. When I worked on the entire spreadsheet, sometimes inserting a line, with all the graphics I had begun to place, took a long time. Working on each year alone, is a lot faster.

With the year separated out, I now turn to my book sources,

The Timetables of History by Grun and Stein

Chronology of CULTURE by Paxton and Fairfield

What Happened When by Carruth.

, History of the World. A beautiful Dorling Kindersley book.

I now and diligently look through each of these to find entries that I did not come across on the internet, and other printed lists. It is possible that there are places that have more listings for each year. I have not found them. And when you go to the Timelines at the Regency Assembly Press page, there you will see all the graphical references as well. Something that I did not find anywhere else.

Here is the start of 1820:

Year

Month Day

Event



1820

29-Jan

On January 29, George III dies, but Prinny will not be crowned until July 19, 1821.



1820

Jan 12

Royal Astronomical Society was founded in England.



1820

Jan 20

Anne Clough, promoter of higher education, was born.



1820

Jan 20 to Jan 29

As George IV was about to become King of England, his wife Caroline (the German princess of Brunswick) returned to claim her rights. She had been living on the continent and was rumored to have had as lovers such men as: the politician George Canning, the admiral Sir Sydney Smith, the painter Sir Thomas Lawrence. The House of Lords introduced a Bill of Pains and Penalties, which sought to strip Caroline of her title of Queen on the grounds of her scandalous conduct. George had previously married Maria Anne Fitzherbert in secret. A trial ensued, but witnesses refused to speak against the queen and the bill had to be amended.



1820

Jan 29

Britain’s King George III (b.1760) died insane at Windsor Castle at age 81, ending a  reign that saw both the American and French revolutions. He was succeeded by his son George IV (1762-1830), who as Prince of Wales had been regent for 9 years during his father’s insanity. In 2005 scientists reported high levels of arsenic in the hair of King George III and said the deadly poison may be to blame for the bouts of apparent madness he suffered. In 2006 Stella Tillyard authored “A Royal Affair: George III and His Troublesome Siblings” and Jeremy Black authored “George III: America’s Last King.”



1820

Jan 30

Edward Bransfield discovered Antarctica and claimed it for the UK.



1820

Jan

A large fire in Savannah, Georgia wiped out 463 buildings.



1820

January

January: John Keats publishes “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn” in his collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.



1820

January

January: King George III dies. The Prince Regent succeeds as King George IV.



1820

January

January: The Duke of Kent dies, leaving his infant daughter Victoria one step closer to the throne.



1820

Feb 6

The American Colonization Society sent its 1st organized emigration of blacks back to Africa from NY to Sierra Leone.



1820

Feb 6

US population announced at 9,638,453 including 1,771,656 blacks (18.4%).



1820

Feb 7

Samuel Adams Holyoke (57/58), composer, died.



1820

Feb 8

General William T. Sherman (d.1891), Union general in America’s Civil War, was born. His famous “March to the Sea” changed the face of modern warfare.



1820

Feb 15

American suffragist Susan B. Anthony (d.1906) was born in Adams, Mass. Her middle name was Brownell. Her biography by Lynn Sherr was titled: “Failure Is Impossible.”



1820

Feb 15

Pierre-Joseph Cambon (63), member of Committee of Public Safety (French Revolution), died.



1820

Feb 17

Henri Vieuxtemps, composer, teacher (Brussels Cons), was born in Verviers, Belgium.



1820

Feb 28

John Tenniel (d.1914), illustrator of “Alice in Wonderland,” was born. He was an English caricaturist.



1820

Feb

The Cato Street Conspiracy, organized by revolutionary Arthur Thistlewood, was the.  assassination of the entire British Cabinet.  Earlier, in 1816, Thistlewood helped plan the Spa Fields Riots, during which the Bank of England and Tower of London were to be seized. In February, 1820, Thistlewood learned the entire British Cabinet planned to dine at the Earl of Harrowby’s house in London’s Grosvenor Square. His plot for murder was revealed to the police, who apprehended Thistlewood and a number of accomplices as they prepared to leave a room on Cato Street for Grosvenor Square. Thistlewood was tried for high treason and hanged, along with four others.



1820

Feb

Five surviving crew members in 2 boats of whale ship Essex were picked up by 2 ships. [see Owen Chase in 1819, 1821]



1820

February

February: The Cato Street Conspiracy is uncovered, in which a group of radical Spenceans, angered by the Peterloo Massacre and the Six Acts, plan to assassinate the prime minister and all his cabinet ministers. Their hope is to overthrow the government and oversee a radical revolution, similar to the French Revolution. One of the conspirators happened to be an agent of the Home Office, who insured that the operation was foiled by a group of Bow Street Runners. Most of the conspirators were convicted of treason and hung.



1820

Mar 3

The Missouri Compromise was passed by Congress. It allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine to enter as a free state. [see Mar 6]



1820

Mar 5

Dutch city of Leeuwarden forbade Jews to go to synagogues on Sundays.



1820

Mar 6

The Missouri Compromise, enacted by Congress, was signed by President James Monroe. This compromise provided for the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state, but prohibited slavery in the rest of the northern Louisiana Purchase territory. The compromise was invalidated in the 1856 Scott vs. Sanford case. [see Mar 3]



1820

Mar 9

Congress passed the Land Act, paving the way for westward expansion.



1820

Mar 9-11

Philippines chased out foreigners and about 125 died.



1820

Mar 14

Victor Emmanuel II, King of Sardinia (1849-61) and Italy (1861-78), was born.



1820

Mar 15

Maine, a province of Massachusetts since 1647, became the 23rd state. Maine entered the Union as a free state and helped maintain the balance in the US Senate, that would have been disrupted by the entrance of Missouri Territory into the Union as a slave state.



1820

Mar 22

The Decatur-Barron Duel. U.S. naval hero Stephen Decatur (b.1779) was killed in a duel with Commodore James Barron near Washington, D.C.



1820

Mar 30

Anna Sewell, English novelist, was born. Her “Black Beauty” has become the classic story about horses.



1820

March

March: Sir Thomas Lawrence is named president of the Royal Academy upon the death of Benjamin West.



1820

Apr 15

Evander McNair, Brig General (Confederate Army), died in 1902, was born.



1820

Apr 17

Alexander Cartwright, sportsman, was born. He developed baseball.



1820

Apr 20

Arthur Young, author (Annals of Agriculture), died.



1820

May 4

Joseph Whitaker, bookseller and publisher, was born. He founded Whitaker’s Almanac.



1820

May 12

Florence Nightingale (d.1910), Crimean War British nurse known as “Lady with the Lamp,” was born in Florence, Italy. She is also known as the founder of modern nursing.



1820

May 13

The opera “Die Jearsbraut” was completed.



1820

May 15

The US Congress designated the slave trade to a form of piracy.



1820

May 23

James Buchanan Eads, engineer of the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, was born.



1820

May

May: John Keats first publishes “La Belle Dame sans Merci” in the May issue of the Indicator



1820

Jun 14

John Bartlett, editor, compiler of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, was born.



1820

Jun 19

Joseph Banks, English natural historian (Cook, Australia), died.



1820

Jun 28

The tomato was proven to be non-poisonous.



1820

June

June: British naturalist and botanist Sir Joseph Banks dies at age 77, having served as president of the Royal Society since 1778.



1820

June

June: Princess Caroline (now Queen Consort) returns to England. Her husband refuses to acknowledge her as Queen and riots break out in support of her.



1820

Jul 10

Captain Jairus of the USRC Louisiana captured four pirate ships off Belize.



1820

Aug 2

John Tyndall (d.1893), British physicist, was born. He was the first scientist to show why the sky is blue. “It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink (at) facts because they are not to our taste.”



1820

Aug 6

M.A. Elisa Bonaparte (43), Corsican monarch of Lucca, died.



1820

Aug 7

The 1st potatoes were planted in Hawaii.



1820

Aug 12

Oliver Mowat, a founder of the Canadian Confederation, was born.



1820

Aug 13

George Grove, biblical scholar, musicographer (Grove’s Dictionary), was born in London, England.



1820

Aug 14

The 1st US eye hospital, the NY Eye Infirmary, opened in NYC.



1820

August

August: Regent’s Canal opens after a decade of construction to link the Grand Junction Canal’s Paddington branch around the city to Limehouse. The eight-and-a-half-mile waterway has cost £772,000 (twice the original estimate), has two tunnels, 12 locks, and in its first year carries 120,000 tons of cargo.



1820

August

August: The Pains and Penalties Bill is introduced in Parliament at the request of George IV, with the aim of dissolving his marriage to Caroline and depriving her of the title Queen. After a hearing in the House of Lords lasting through November, the bill is thrown out. (The following July, Caroline is barred from the king’s coronation, and dies 3 weeks later.)



1820

Sep 2

China’s Emperor Jiaqing (b.1760) died.



1820

Sep 4

Czar Alexander declared that Russian influence in North America extended as far south as Oregon and closed Alaskan waters to foreigners.



1820

Sep 20

John Fulton Reynolds, Major General (Union volunteers), was born. He died in 1863 on first day at Gettysburg.



1820

Sep 26

The legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone died quietly at the Defiance, Mo., home of his son Nathan, at age 85.



1820

Sep 28

Friedrich Engels, socialist who collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, was born.



1820

Sep

John Keats and the young painter Severn started for Italy aboard the cargo boat Maria Crowther.



1820

Sep

William Moorcroft, East India Co. head of 5,000 acre horse farm at Pusa, India, arrived in Ladakh, while enroute to Bukhara, Uzbekistan, to trade for horses. He spent 2 years here before continuing his journey.



1820

Oct 6

Jenny Lind (d.1887), soprano, was born. She was known as the “Swedish Nightingale.”



1820

Oct 11

Sir George Williams, founder of the YMCA, was born.



1820

Oct 12

John James Audubon boarded the steamboat Western Engineer in Cincinnati, Ohio, and embarked on a 5-year journey along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers collecting and painting birds.



1820

Oct 15

Florence Nightingale (d.1910), English hospital reformer and nursing pioneer, was born. “Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”



1820

Oct 20

Spain sold a part of Florida to US for $5 million.



1820

Oct

Argentina’s Jose de San Martin blockaded Lima, Peru, and urged the people of Peru to join in the uprising against Spain.



1820

Nov 18

U.S. Navy Capt. Nathaniel B. Palmer discovered the frozen continent of Antarctica.



1820

Nov 28

Friedrich Engels (d.1895), German social philosopher; Marx’s collaborator, was born.



1820

Dec 6

James Monroe, the 5th US president, was elected for a 2nd term.



1820

Dec 7

Peru’s army, after sweeping out the Spanish, swore in the first mayor of the Peruvian Republic, in Chaupimarca plaza, the central district of Cerro de Pasco. By 2010 the town faced destruction due to industrial mining.



1820

Dec 20

Missouri imposed a $1 bachelor tax on unmarried men between 21 and 50.



1820

Dec

Franz Schubert composed his String Quartet No. 12 in C Minor (Quartettsatz). It was only introduced to the public in 1867.



1820



American writer Washington Irving publishes The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent , which includes the stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”



1820



An attempt to assassinate the cabinet ministers of England fails in what becomes known as the Cato Street conspiracy.



1820



Bristol’s Royal York Crescent is completed.



1820



Britain’s George III dies at age 81, and is succeeded by George IV, who is corpulent and 57 years old. He will rule until 1830.



1820



Congress of Troppau convenes to consider the revolt in Naples.



1820



Francisco de Goya paints Saturn Devouring His Children.



1820



George III dies; George IV becomes king.



1820



George IV’s official wife, Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, whom he detests, demands to be recognized as Queen. The king offers her £3000 to stay abroad, never take a royal title, and not to attempt to exercise any royal rights. In the meantime, the King tries to arrange a divorce and postpones his coronation upon its outcome. The House of Commons and House of Lords pass a bill to grant the divorce and deprive Caroline of her “Queenship”, but the common people rally to her side. Due to public pressure the bill is dropped, and in celebration the cities of London, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Dublin, to name a few, illuminate their cities for 3 days.



1820



John Constable paints The Hay Wain.



1820



Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems. “To a Skylark” is one of the poems published here for the first time.



1820



Revolutions by liberals occur in Spain, Italy, and Portugal.



1820



Teacher Maria Becraft, 15, opens the first black girl’s boarding school in Washington, D.C.



1820



The Book of Job in the Old Testament is published with illustrations by William Blake.



1820



The Egyptians begin the conquering of the Sudan.



1820



The Hay Wain by John Constable. It is revered today as one of the greatest British paintings of the 19th century, but when it was originally exhibited at the Royal Academy it failed to find a buyer. It was better received in France, where it caused a sensation when it was exhibited with other works by Constable at the 1824 Paris Salon. It was singled out for a gold medal awarded by King Charles X of France.




1820



The Missouri Compromise comes to play, which admits several states into the Union, including the slave state of Missouri.



1820



The Royal Astronomical Society is founded by, among others, inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage and astronomer Sir John Frederick Herschel.



1820



The Venus de Milo is discovered in the Greek Island of Melos.



1820



Walter Scott publishes The Monastery and The Abbot, and is made a baronet by George IV.



1820





1820



From August to November, Prinny seeks to divorce Queen Caroline, whom he finds detestable, by having her tried by Parliament



1820



Death of George III. Accession of The Prince Regent as George IV. The House of Lords passes a bill to grant George IV a divorce from Queen Caroline, but due to public pressure the bill is dropped, John Constable begins work on The Hay Wain. Cato Street Conspiracy fails. Royal Astronomical Society founded. Venus de Milo discovered.



1820



The combined area of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi and Alabama has six times the number of people of European heritage that it had in 1800.



1820



A liberal uprising begins in Spain. It starts with soldiers and is joined by others who want a constitutional monarchy or a republic. A few who are poor and illiterate attack and set fire to churches.



1820



The U.S. has becomes the world’s biggest cotton producer of raw cotton.



1820



Per capita world Gross Domestic Product (according to today’s economic historian Angus Maddison) is $667, measured in 1990 dollars. This (according to Maddison) is up from $435 in the year 1000. Western Europe, which was lower than the world in general in the year 1000, at $400, is at $1,232.



1820



Anne Bronte (d.1849), younger sister of Charlotte and Emily, was born. Her novels included “Agnes Grey” and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”



1820



Lola Montez, cabaret singer and countess, was born Eliza Gilbert and grew up in India as a military brat. She was later involved with King Ludvig of Bavaria and he made her Countess of Landsfeld. She later traveled to California. Her biography by Bruce Seymour is titled: “Lola Montez: A Life.”



1820



Constable made his painting of Salisbury Cathedral.



1820



Keisai Eisen, Japanese artist, pictured an intricately coifed woman that later appeared on the cover of a French magazine and inspired Van Gogh’s 1887 “Courtesan.”



1820



Mary Shelley wrote her children’s story “Maurice, or the Fisher’s Cot. ” It did not get published until 1998 when Claire Tomalin published an edition with an extensive editorial preface.



1820



Helen Keller’s grandfather built the Ivy Green House in Tuscumbia, Alabama.



1820



The Mexican government granted Luis Peralta (1759-1851) the 44,800-acre Rancho San Antonio in the East Bay of northern California, for his military services. The rancho ran from San Leandro Creek to a rise known as El Cerrito. Peralta settled in San Jose, while his four sons took over the land grant. The Peralta Hacienda in Oakland was built in 1870.



1820



In New Jersey a county poorhouse farm was established on 200 acres of land in what later became Hudson County, directly across the river from Manhattan. Be the end of the century it had become the sprawling Snake Hill complex with isolation hospitals and 3 burial grounds. In the 20th century it was renamed Laurel Hill. The institutions steadily emptied after the Depression and in 1950 the new New Jersey Turnpike ran through the site. In 2002 the New Jersey Turnpike Authority purchased the eastern burial ground of Snake Hill. Research soon revealed an estimated 3,500 burials on the purchased property, which became known as the Secaucus Potter’s field site. In 2003 the last burial was disinterred for a total of 4,571 sets of human remains from 2686 graves.



1820



In Tennessee an iron forge was established by settler Isaac Love on the Little Pigeon River at the foot of the Great Smokey Mountains.



1820



Congregational missionaries from New England arrived. The brig Thaddeus delivered the first missionaries and Lucy Thurston taught the native women to sew calico patch work. James Michener later used their story as the focus of his historical novel “Hawaii.”



1820



Thomas Jefferson wrote of slavery: “We have a wolf by the ears and can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Although a slaveholder himself, Jefferson had expressed hopes that in the wake of the American Revolution, slavery in the South would wither and die.



1820



Eliphalet Snedecor rented land on Long Island, NY, and established a tavern. It became popular among fisherman and bird shooters.



1820



Norwich Univ. began as a private military college in the Green Mountains of Vermont.



1820



American cotton exports reached 400,000 bales a year.



1820



An American whaling ship from Brighton, Massachusetts, was later believed to be the first to enter Japanese waters.



1820



In the Antelope seizure, a Spanish flag vessel was involved at a time when Spain still sanctioned the slave trade.



1820



The industrial force exceeded the number of people engaged in agriculture in Great Britain.



1820



There are more than a thousand ships engaged in transporting timber from the North America to the British Isles. Human cargo filled the return journey.



1820



US census takers on the Virginia-Tennessee border at Stone Mountain labeled the local Melungeons as “free persons of color.” The people were of a mixed ancestry, neither all black, nor all white, nor all Indian. In 1997 some 500 Melungeon descendents still lived in the area. Later N. Brent Kennedy wrote: “The Melungeons… An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America.”



1820



Hans Christian Oersted, Danish physicist, discovered that an electric current creates a magnetic field around a conductor.



1820



The Greek Venus de Milo statue of marble was found in 1820 on Melos and is now in the Louvre. It was sculpted about c200BC. [2nd source says 2,500 years old]



1820



Scotsman Gregor MacGregor (1791-1845), later known as His Serene Highness Gregor I, Prince of Poyais, returned to London from Venezuela and began selling land in the fictional kingdom of Poyais. He served 8 months in jail after English and French expeditions revealed the hoax. In 1839 he returned to Venezuela. In 2004 David Sinclair authored “The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Land Fraud in History.”



1820



Some 4,000 British colonists, the Albany settlers, settled in the eastern coastal region of the Cape of Good Hope.



1820



In London Thomas Hancock sliced up a rubber bottle from the Americas to create garters and waistbands.



1820



In India the Prince of Baroda was forbidden to increase his daily number of canon salutes by the British Raj, so instead he had his fort’s canons made from solid gold at 28 pounds each.



1820



In southern Poland Jan Kutschera opened the Sczcawnica Zdroj health resort. He sold it in 1929 to the Hungarian Szalay family, which turned it into a fashionable place. Josef Szalay bequeathed it to Krakow’s Academy of Arts and Sciences, which sold it to Count Stadnicki in 1909. Stadnicki (d.1982 at 99) was ousted by the communists in 1948. By 2008 his heirs had regained control of the spa and invested $4.5 million in restoration.



1820



Nguyen Du (b.1766), author of “The Tale of Kieu,” died. His Vietnamese epic tells the story of woman who sells herself into prostitution to pay off her father’s debt.



1820



Grain prices collapsed in Britain.



1820



Renegade Zulus rebelled against King Chaka, but were crushed. Descendents of the renegade Zulus are of the Ndebele tribe, which forms a 5th of Zimbabwe’s 11 million people, the majority of which are of the Shona tribe.



1820



The Garinagu, descendants of African slaves and Caribbean Indians, fled to Belize from the Bay Islands of Honduras.



1820-1825



In India Ghulam Ali Khan painted his gouache and watercolor: “Assembly of Ascetics and Yogins around a Fire.”



1820-1891



George Hearst, later businessman and politician, was born.



1820-1903



Herbert Spencer, nineteenth-century British thinker and early upholder of the theory of evolution, regarded human progress as “not an accident but a necessity.” Spencer was born in England believed that every aspect of reality must be viewed in terms of a continuing development from lower to higher stages. His naturalistic philosophy had a great influence on the development of biology, psychology, anthropology and sociology. Spencer published his idea of the evolution of biological species before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest in his 1864 work Principles of Biology. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.”



1820-1904



Christian Nestell Bovee, American author: “Doubt whom you will, but never doubt yourself.”



1820-1910



Felix Nadar, French photographer, was born in Paris as Gaspard-Felix Tournachon. He is known for photographing such people as George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Gioacchino Rossini, Eugene Delacroix, Sarah Burnhardt, Charles Baudelaire and Gerard de Nerval. He was the first photographer to experiment with electric lighting, and explored the realm of aerial photography.