1870 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – William Ewart Gladstone
• Parliament – 20th

  Events

• 28 January – General Post Office takes over business of private telegraph companies.
• 5 March – first ever international football match, England v Scotland, takes place under the approval of the Football Association at The Oval, London.
• 10 May – Jem Mace wins the boxing championship of the world, defeating fellow Englishman Tom Allen at Kenner, near New Orleans.
• 19 May – the Home Government Association is established in Ireland by Isaac Butt to argue for devolution for Ireland and repeal of the Act of Union 1800.
• late Spring – Army Enlistment Act allows reduction in length of enlistment to the British Army as part of the Cardwell Reforms.
• 2 June – competitive examination for entry to the British civil service introduced.
• 8 June - the final splice to the first telegraph submarine cable to India is made off Porthcurno, Cornwall.
• 23 June – Keble College, Oxford, opens, the first new college of the University of Oxford in more than a century.
• 2 August – official opening of the Tower Subway beneath the River Thames in London, the world's first underground passenger "tube" railway. Although this lasts as a railway operation only until November, it demonstrates the technologically successful first use of the cylindrical wrought iron tunnelling shield devised by Peter W. Barlow and James Henry Greathead.
• 4 August – British Red Cross established as the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War by Lord Wantage.
• 9 August
• * Elementary Education Act 1870 drafted by William Edward Forster MP encourages elementary education by creating a system of School boards in England and Wales. Women are eligible to stand and vote for local school boards where created.
• * Married Women's Property Act confirms that wives may own property of their own.
• 1 October – postcards and halfpenny postage stamps introduced by the Post Office.
• Undated – the David Greig grocery chain begins with a store in London.

  Publications

• 1 January – The Northern Echo newspaper launched in Darlington.
• April–September – serialisation of Charles Dickens' novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, only half complete due to his death on 9 June.
• Edward Jenkins' satire Ginx's Baby: his birth and other misfortunes.
• William Robinson's gardening book The Wild Garden.
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poems, exhumed from Elizabeth Siddal's grave.

  Births

• 5 February – C. E. Brock, painter and illustrator
• 7 January – Gordon Hewart, 1st Viscount Hewart, English judge and politician, 7th Lord Chief Justice of England
• 12 February – Marie Lloyd, music-hall singer
• 4 March – Thomas Sturge Moore, poet, author and artist
• 17 March – Horace Donisthorpe, entomologist
• 9 May – Harry Vardon, golfer
• 4 August – Harry Lauder, Scottish entertainer
• 11 August – Tom Richardson, cricketer
• 12 August – Hubert Gough, general
• 22 August – Bertram Fletcher Robinson, journalist, editor and author
• 21 October – Horace Hood, admiral
• 22 October – Lord Alfred Douglas, minor Uranian poet best remembered as a lover of writer Oscar Wilde
• 30 October – Lawrence Grant, film actor
• 18 November – P. Morley Horder, architect
• 18 December – Saki, short-story writer
• Doncaster, racehorse

  Deaths

• 2 January – Ignatius Bonomi, architect and surveyor
• 20 January – Sir George Seymour, admiral of the fleet
• 25 January – Janet Taylor, mathematician and navigational instrument maker
• 25 April – Daniel Maclise, historical painter
• 6 May – James Young Simpson, physician and researcher
• 17 May – David Octavius Hill, Scottish painter and pioneer photographer
• 24 April – Louisa Stuart Costello, miniature-painter, poet, historical novelist and travel writer
• 9 June – Charles Dickens, novelist
• 12 September – Eleanora Atherton, philanthropist in Manchester
• 9 December – Patrick MacDowell, sculptor
• 28 December – Philip Hardwick, architect