George Eliot publishes The Mill on the Floss, her novel about the childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver

English chemist and physicist William Crookes isolates a new element, thallium

Prince Albert dies of typhoid, plunging Victoria into forty years of widowhood and deep mourning

Cotton's Wharf burns

A suspension bridge is completed at Lambeth

Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas

The future Cassel Hospital estate, now with a single mansion, is leased for nine years to HRH Robert Philippe, Duc de Chartres, exiled from France along with his grandfather, King Louis Philippe

Oxford mathematician Lewis Carroll tells 10-year-old Alice Liddell, on a boat trip, a story about her own adventures in Wonderland

British architect George Gilbert Scott designs a memorial for Prince Albert in Kensington Gardens

After more than a century of growing citrus fruits and other plants, the Orangery is turned into a museum.

English author Charles Kingsley publishes an improving fantasy for young children, The Water-Babies

The Metropolitan Railway, the world's first to go underground, opens in London using steam trains between Paddington and Farringdon Street

48-year-old Julia Margaret Cameron is given a camera by her daughter, in the Isle of Wight, and decides to concentrate on portraits

The Marylebone Cricket Club, arbiter of cricket, finally rules that overarm bowling is legitimate

York House is acquired on behalf of the Comte de Paris, exiled Orleanist claimant to the French throne.

The First International is established in London, with Karl Marx soon emerging as the association's leader

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell presents to the Royal Society his discoveries in the field of electromagnetics, now known collectively as Maxwell's Equations

The Hungerford Railway Bridge, also known as the Charing Cross Railway Bridge, brings trains to Charing Cross Station

The last survivor of the Richmond tontine dies, at the age of 91, ending the payment of interest and making the Richmond Bridge free of tolls

A west wing is added to Garrick's Villa by Sylvanus Phillips

The third Hampton Court Bridge is built, replacing one on the same line that was pulled down in 1864, made of wrought-iron lattice girders in five spans on cast-iron columns

English surgeon Joseph Lister introduces the era of antiseptic surgery, with the use of carbolic acid in the operating theatre

Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a development of the story he had told Alice Liddell three years earlier

A committee to campaign for women's suffrage is formed in Manchester, the first of many in Britain

Algernon Swinburne scandalizes Victorian Britain with his first collection, Poems and Ballads