1789 in Great Britain

• Monarch – George III • Prime Minister – William Pitt the Younger (Tory) ==Events==

• 3 February – Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger introduces a Regency Bill to Parliament so that the Prince of Wales may serve as regent for his father George III during a period of mental illness, but the King recovers before the Bill becomes law. • March – first version of a graphic description of a slave ship (the Brookes) issued on behalf of the English Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. • 18 March – Catherine Murphy, a counterfeiter, becomes the last woman in Britain to suffer a sentence of death by burning, at Newgate Prison in London (although she is in practice strangled before being burnt). • April – Privy Council report on the slave trade published. • 20 April – first boat passes through the Thames and Severn Canal's Sapperton Tunnel near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. At it is the longest tunnel of any kind in England at this date. • 28 April – Fletcher Christian leads a mutiny on HMS Bounty against Captain William Bligh in Polynesia. • 12 May – William Wilberforce makes his first major speech in the House of Commons on the abolition of the slave trade. • 14 June – Mutiny on the Bounty survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 4,000-mile journey in an open boat. • 17 September – William Herschel discovers Mimas, another of Saturn's moons. Undated • Charles Dibdin introduces the nautical song Tom Bowling in his London entertainment The Oddities. • The song The Lass of Richmond Hill, with music by James Hook to words by Leonard McNally, is first performed publicly by Charles Incledon at Vauxhall Gardens in London. • Rev. Dr. Edmund Cartwright patents his first practical power loom and designs a wool combing machine. • Andrew Pears introduces Pears soap in London. ==Publications==

• William Blake's book of poetry Songs of Innocence and of Experience ==Births==

• 5 January – Thomas Pringle, poet (died 1834) • 14 July – Timothy Yeats Brown, consul to Genoa (died 1858) • 19 July – John Martin, painter (died 1854) • 28 September – Richard Bright, physician, "Father of Nephrology" (died 1858) • 25 December – Elizabeth Jesser Reid, social reformer (died 1866) • James Morrison, millionaire retail draper and politician (died 1857) ==Deaths==

• 1 January – Fletcher Norton, 1st Baron Grantley, politician (born 1716) • 8 January – Jack Broughton, English boxer (born 1703) • 23 January – Frances Brooke, writer (born 1724) • 23 January – John Cleland, novelist (born 1709) • 26 February – Eclipse, racehorse (born 1764) • 20 July – David Nelson, botanist on (birth date unknown) • 26 November – John Elwes, miser and politician (born 1714) ==See also==