1842 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – Sir William Rae, Bt until October; then Duncan McNeill
• Solicitor General for Scotland – Duncan McNeill; then Adam Anderson

  Judiciary

• Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General – Lord Boyle
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Hope

  Events

• 3 January – 3rd Scottish Convention of Chartists opens in Glasgow.
• 21 February – Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway opened.
• 29 April – New Market opened in Aberdeen.
• May – the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland makes a "Claim of Rights" asserting the church's independence of state control in spiritual matters.
• 1 September – Queen Victoria arrives by sea at Granton, Edinburgh, to start her first visit to Scotland.
• September – Robert Davidson's experimental battery-electric locomotive Galvani is demonstrated on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway.
• The Sobieski Stuarts' Vestiarium Scoticum is published in Edinburgh, purporting to be a reproduction from an old manuscript illustrating traditional Scottish clan tartan dress.
• A velocipede rider from Dumfriesshire, perhaps Kirkpatrick Macmillan, knocks down a pedestrian in the Gorbals district of Glasgow.
• James Shanks patents and begins to produce the pony-drawn lawn mower.
• Carnoustie Golf Links opened.

  Births

• 16 April – Laidlaw Purves, surgeon and golfer
• 1 May – David Boyle, archaeologist in Canada
• 27 June – Jamie Anderson, golfer
• 20 September – James Dewar chemist and physicist
• 12 October – Robert Gillespie Reid, railway contractor in Canada

  Deaths

• 28 April – Charles Bell, surgeon, anatomist, neurologist and philosophical theologian
• 31 May – James Fergusson, judge
• 12 December – Robert Haldane, theologian
• 24 December – Adam Gillies, Lord Gillies, judge