1839 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – John Murray until April; then Andrew Rutherfurd
• Solicitor General for Scotland – Andrew Rutherfurd; then James Ivory

  Judiciary

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

  Events

• January – the first parallax measurement of the distance to Alpha Centauri is published by Thomas Henderson.
• 29 May – Mungo Ponton presents his discovery of the light-sensitive quality of sodium dichromate as a method of permanent photography.
• 10 June – Major Chartist meeting on Glasgow Green.
• 15 June – David Clark, the first emigrant ship to sail directly from Great Britain to Port Phillip sets out from Greenock under the command of Capt. J. B. Mills, with mainly Scots assisted immigrants, arriving in Australia on 27 October.
• 15 July – first clipper ship launched in Britain, the schooner Scottish Maid at Alexander Hall's yard in Aberdeen.
• August – National Chartist organisation set up in Scotland.
• 30 August – the Eglinton Tournament, a recreation of a medieval tourney, takes place at Eglinton Castle, North Ayrshire.
• October – earthquakes across Scotland.
• City of Glasgow Bank established.
• James Templeton's textile company is established at Bridgeton, Glasgow.
• Consumer cooperatives established in Galashiels and Hawick, predecessors of the Lothian, Borders & Angus Co-operative Society.
• Decision of the House of Lords on appeal in the Auchterarder case that the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland's Veto Act of 1835 is invalid.
• George Murray, 6th Duke of Atholl, revives the Atholl Highlanders as a personal bodyguard.
• Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals established in Edinburgh.
• Roderick Murchison publishes The Silurian System.
• Claimed invention of the rear-wheel driven bicycle by Kirkpatrick Macmillan.

  Births

• 4 January – Anne Jane Cupples, née Douglas, writer
• 13 February – William Arrol, civil engineering contractor
• 17 March – John Pettie, painter
• 26 March – John Mackay, pioneer in Australia
• 4 April – James Blyth, electrical engineer
• 18 April – Donald MacKinnon, Celtic scholar
• 7 May – Joseph Hunter, surveyor, civil engineer and politician in British Columbia
• 10 June – James Cleland, merchant and politician in Ontario
• 17 May – Alexander Davidson, architect in Australia
• 23 August – James Geikie, geologist
• 8 September – John Aitken, meteorologist
• 21 October – Joseph Tait, businessman and politician in Ontario
• 30 October – Flora Stevenson, social reformer
• 3 November – Aeneas James George Mackay, lawyer and historian
• 17 November – David Farquharson, landscape painter
• 18 December – William Grant, whisky distiller
• 26 December – Selina Murray McDonald Sutherland, nurse and social reformer in Australasia
• James Caldwell, politician
• Arthur Lloyd, music hall entertainer
• Charles Macintosh, folk music composer and performer and mycologist
• Alexander Provand, Liberal politician
• James Galloway Weir, businessman and Liberal politician

  Deaths

• 22 January – Christian Ramsay, Lady Dalhousie, botanist
• 17 February – William Adam of Blair Adam, lawyer
• 11 April – John Galt, novelist and entrepreneur
• 17 May – Archibald Alison, Episcopalian minister and writer
• 7 September – Sir Andrew Halliday, physician
• 21 September – James Mylne, philosopher