Catholic prioress (born 1823) 23 May – Brian Houghton Hodgson, civil servant, ethnologist and naturalist (born 1800) 14 June – John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge, Lord Chief Justice (born 1820) 1 September – Boston Corbett, Union Army soldier who shot and killed Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth (born 1832) 5 September – Augusta Webster, poet (born 1837) 20 October – James Anthony Froude, historian and religious controversialist (born 1818) 3 December – Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish author (born 1850) (dies in Samoa) 19 December – James Allen Harker, entomologist (born 1847) 24 December – Frances Buss, pioneer of women's education (born 1827) 29 December – Christina Rossetti, poet (born 1830) References Years of the 19th century in the United Kingdom