Richard Wagner writes an anti-semitic tract, Jewishness in Music

Herman Melville publishes Moby Dick; or, The Whale, a novel based on his own 18-month experience on a whaler in 1841-2

A journalist in the Terre Haute Express gives a piece of advice, 'Go west, young man', that chimes perfectly with the US pioneer spirit

The president of France, Louis Napoleon, stages a coup d'état, rounding up his political opponents during a long December night

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are entered in the ten-yearly census, and were staying on the night in question in Buckingham Palace

After the establishment of the Royal Botanical Gardens, a library and herbarium is opened at Hunter’s House on north-west side of Kew Green.

Pugin does not attend the opening of the completed Houses of Parliament, and there is hardly a mention of him

After years of strain and overwork, Pugin has a nervous breakdown and he is certified insane

Pugin dies, at home in Ramsgate, and is buried in the chantry of the church he is building next door, St Augustine's

Lord John Russell's Whig administration collapses, and Lord Derby follows him as a Conservative prime minister at the head of a coalition government

The citizens of the US are scandalized to discover that the Mormons practise polygamy

The first Metropolis Water Act is passed which forbids the taking of water by the water companies from the tidal Thames and this leads to the establishment of what was to become Hampton Waterworks

Queen Victoria opens the new Houses of Parliament, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin

The Crystal Palace is dismantled in Hyde Park, to be re-erected south of the river Thames at Sydenham

France demands that Turkey should end Russia's exclusive control of the Christian Holy Places in the Ottoman empire

In the four years since the discovery of gold, the population of California has leapt from 14,000 to 250,000

Scottish physicist William Thomson formulates the second law of thermodynamics, concerning the transfer of heat within a closed system

Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes a massively successful antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that sells 300,000 copies in its first year

The church of St Mary Magdalen in Mortlake, designed in Gothic style by Gilbert Blount, is completed

US entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt conveys passengers across the American continent through Nicaragua by steamship and horse and carriage

The Mortlake brewery, after passing through several hands, is acquired by the Phillips family

In an Argentinian civil war, Urquiza defeats the dictator Rosas and is subsequently elected president (in 1854)

Russia insists that her exclusive rights over the Holy Places are enshrined in the treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji

Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce wins the US presidential election, defeating his Whig opponent Winfield Scott

Louis Napoleon, asking the French people to approve his elevation to emperor as Napoleon III, receives a resounding yes in the plebiscite