English poet Robert Browning publishes a vivid narrative poem about the terrible revenge of The Pied Piper of Hamelin

English author Thomas Babington Macaulay publishes a collection of stirring ballads, Lays of Ancient Rome

Ebenezer Scrooge mends his ways just in time in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

In his novel Coningsby Benjamin Disraeli develops the theme of Conservatism uniting 'two nations', the rich and the poor

Friedrich Engels, after running a textile factory in Manchester, publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England

Edward Lear publishes his Book of Nonsense, consisting of limericks illustrated with his own cartoons

After marrying secretly, the English poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett go abroad to live in Florence

The three Brontë sisters jointly publish a volume of their poems and sell just two copies

English author William Makepeace Thackeray begins publication of his novel Vanity Fair in monthly parts (book form 1848)

Charlotte becomes the first of the Brontë sisters to have a novel published — Jane Eyre

Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights follows just two months after her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre

Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë die within a period of eight months

Charles Dickens begins the publication in monthly numbers of David Copperfield, his own favourite among his novels

Alfred Tennyson's elegy for a friend, In Memoriam, captures perfectly the Victorian mood of heightened sensibility

London physician Peter Mark Roget publishes his dictionary of synonyms, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases

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

Tennyson publishes a long narrative poem, Maud, a section of which ('Come into the garden, Maud') becomes famous as a song

English author Anthony Trollope publishes The Warden, the first in his series of six Barsetshire novels

In Tom Brown's Schooldays Thomas Hughes depicts the often brutal aspects of an English public school

English author George Eliot wins fame with her first full-length novel, Adam Bede

Charles Darwin puts forward the theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species, the result of twenty years' research

In On Liberty John Stuart Mill makes the classic liberal case for the priority of the freedom of the individual

Samuel Smiles provides an inspiring ideal of Victorian enterprise in Self-Help, a manual for ambitious young men

Tennyson publishes the first part of Idylls of the King, a series of linked poems about Britain's mythical king Arthur

Charles Dickens publishes his French Revolution novel, A Tale of Two Cities