William Baikie, on an expedition up the Niger, protects his men from malaria by administering quinine

Ferdinand de Lesseps is granted the concession to construct a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea

Australian gold diggers, angered by the requirement to purchase a licence, make a defiant stand at the Eureka stockade

English physician John Snow proves that cholera is spread by infected water (from a pump in London's Broad Street)

Britain and France enter the war between Turkey and Russia, on the Turkish side

A London editor decides to send a reporter, William Howard Russell ('Russell of The Times'), to the Crimean front

Thoreau publishes an account of his two years of self-sufficient transcendentalism in his hut at Walden Pond

British and French troops land at Sebastopol, to besiege the port, and win a limited victory over the Russians at the river Alma

Florence Nightingale, responding to reports of horrors in the Crimea, sets sail with a party of twenty-eight nurses

An inconclusive battle at Balaklava includes the Charge of the Light Brigade, with British cavalry recklessly led towards Russian guns

An inconclusive engagement at Inkerman means that the allies in the Crimea have to dig in for the winter besieging Sebastopol

Within six weeks of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, Tennyson publishes a poem finding heroism in the disaster

Pope Pius IX issues a papal bull declaring that the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary is to be an article of faith for Catholics

On their return to England, Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes pretend to be married (Lewes is unable to get a divorce)

Calling themselves Mr and Mrs Lewes, Marian and George move into lodgings at 7 Clarence Row in East Sheen

Marian Evans (George Eliot) and G.H. Lewes move into lodgings at 8 Parkshot in Richmond, with Mrs Croft as their landlady

Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole sets up her own 'British Hotel' in the Crimea to provide food and nursing for soldiers in need

Alfred Mynn stands for his picture to be taken

Frances restores and enlarges Strawberry Hill including the addition of the Waldegrave Drawing Room, spending in excess of £100,000.

Roger Fenton travels out from England to the Crimea – the world's first war photographer

Lord Palmerston heads the coalition government in Britain after Lord Aberdeen loses a vote of confidence on his conduct of the Crimean War

Robert Remak expresses the central principle of cell biology, that all cells derive from the division of pre-existing cells

Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat combines realism and symbolism in an extreme example of Pre-Raphaelite characteristics

Rudolf Virchow publishes Remak's proposition as his own, expressing it in the Latin phrase Omnis cellula e cellula ("every cell derives from another cell")

By 1855 the Southwark and Vauxhall, the Grand Junction and the West Middlesex Water Companies have all established works at Hampton and these are now collectively known as Hampton Waterworks