Eadweard Muybridge publishes Animal Locomotion, a folio volume containing 781 pages of photographs

An undetected murderer, slitting the throats of seven London prostitutes, becomes known by the public as Jack the Ripper

23-year-old Irish author William Butler Yeats publishes his first volume of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin

The Phillips family sells the Mortlake brewery to Watney’s

English musicologist George Grove completes publication of his four-volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Charles Steward Parnell is cited as co-respondent in a divorce case brought against Kitty O'Shea

Elizabeth Twining dies and leaves Dial House to the parish for use as a vicarage.

The Fabian Society publishes Essays in Socialisman influential volume of essays edited by Bernard Shaw

The explorer and Arabist Richard Burton dies in the British consulate in Trieste

A vast cantilever bridge, spanning a mile of water, carries the railway across the Firth of Forth in Scotland

The world's first electric underground railway passes under the Thames, linking the City of London and Stockwell

Dial House is extensively restored and altered and the present sundial is installed.

Scottish anthropologist James Frazer publishes The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge about ritual and religious custom

9-year-old Daisy Ashford imagines an adult romance and high society in The Young Visiters

Sir Richard Burton is buried in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen in Mortlake, in a mausoleum resembling an Arab tent, designed by his wife

Britain cedes the tiny island of Heligoland to Germany in return for vast areas of Africa

A Gaelic pressure group, the Highland Association, is founded to preserve the indigenous poetry and music of Scotland

Oscar Wilde publishes his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which the ever-youthful hero's portrait grows old and ugly

Thomas Hardy publishes his novel Tess of the Durbervilles, with a dramatic finale at Stonehenge

Oscar Wilde's comedy Lady Windermere's Fan is a great success with audiences in London's St. James Theatre

W.B. Yeats founds the National Literary Society in Dublin, with Douglas Hyde as its first president

W.B. Yeats publishes a short play The Countess Cathleen, his first contribution to Irish poetic drama

Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses, deals with the serious social problem of slum landlords

Keir Hardie wins the London seat of West Ham, becoming the first Labour member of the House of Commons

Gladstone, becoming prime minister for the fourth time, is described by the queen as 'an old, wild and incomprehensible man of eighty two and a half'