1891 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
• Parliament – 24th

  Events

• 14 February – in the FA Cup quarter final in English Association football, a goal is deliberately stopped by handball on the goal line. An indirect free kick is awarded, since the penalty kick, proposed the previous year by William McCrum, has not yet been implemented. This event probably changes public opinion on the penalty kick, seen previously as 'an Irishman's motion'.
• 1 to 28 February – the driest month in the EWP series with an average of only.
• 9–12 March – the Great Blizzard of 1891 in the south and west of England leads to extensive snow drifts and powerful storms off the south coast, with 14 ships sunk and approximately 220 deaths attributed to the weather conditions.
• 17 March – the British steamship sinks in the inner harbour of Gibraltar after collision with the battleship HMS Anson, killing 564.
• 18 March – official opening of the London-Paris telephone system.
• 1 April – the London-Paris telephone system is opened to the general public.
• 5 April – census in the United Kingdom: 15.6 million people live in cities of 20,000 or more in England and Wales and cities of 20,000 or more account for 54% of the total English population. The number of Welsh speakers in Wales is recorded for the first time and constitutes 54.4% of the population.
• 25 June – Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes appears in The Strand Magazine for the first time.

  Undated

• Abolition of fees for primary schooling.
• Baptist Union of Great Britain established by merger of the General and Particular Baptists.
• Deptford Power Station is commissioned, pioneering the use of high voltage alternating current, generating 800 kW for public supply.
• Rachel Beer takes over editorship of The Observer, the first woman to edit a national newspaper.

  Publications

• J. M. Barrie's novel The Little Minister.
• George Gissing's novel New Grub Street.
• Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
• William Morris' novel News from Nowhere.
• Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories.
• Henry James' short story The Pupil published in Longman's Magazine.
• Strand Magazine.

  Births

• 9 February – Ronald Colman, English actor
• 11 February – J. W. Hearne, English cricketer
• 23 February – Robert Barrington-Ward, English newspaper editor
• 2 April – Jack Buchanan, Scottish actor and film director
• 22 April – Harold Jeffreys, English mathematician
• 7 May – Harry McShane, Scottish socialist
• 20 June – John A. Costello, third Taoiseach of Ireland, second to use that title
• 30 June – Stanley Spencer, painter
• 2 August – Arthur Bliss, composer
• 6 August – William Slim, Field Marshal
• 30 August – Henry Tandey, most highly decorated British private soldier of World War I
• 8 October – Ellen Wilkinson, English socialist
• 20 October – James Chadwick, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 13 December – Hubert Phillips, economist, journalist, bridge player and composer of puzzles

  Deaths

• 6 January – Hugh Owen Thomas, orthopaedic surgeon
• 30 January – Charles Bradlaugh, political activist, founder and first president of the National Secular Society and Member of Parliament for Northampton
• 15 March – Sir Joseph Bazalgette, sanitary engineer
• 13 April – Edward Austin, cricketer
• 29 May – William Synge, diplomat and author
• 7 June – William Bosomworth, cricketer
• 6 October
• * Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish nationalist leader
• * William Henry Smith, politician and founder of W H Smith
• 15 October – Gilbert Arthur à Beckett, humorous writer and