Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah has its premiere in England, in the city of Birmingham

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

Landlords in Scotland begin to clear crofters from Highland estates so as to provide pasture for sheep

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

A new Factory Act is passed in Britain, limiting the working day of women and children to a maximum of ten hours

Scottish obstetrician James Simpson uses anaesthetic (ether, and later in the year choloroform) to ease difficulty in childbirth

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

At a congress in London Engels persuades a group of radical Germans to adopt the name Communist League

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

English mathematician George Boole describes Boolean algebra in his pamphlet Mathematical Analysis of Logic

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

Scottish physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, proposes the 'absolute' scale of temperature

English art students Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

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

Scottish painter David Roberts completes publication of his 6-volume The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia

Expelled from Germany after the year of revolutions, Marx makes his home in tolerant London

Queen Victoria knights her favourite painter of animals, Edwin Landseer

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

British engineer Robert Stephenson completes a box-girder railway bridge over the Menai Strait, between Anglesey and mainland Wales

English cartoonist John Tenniel begins a 50-year career drawing for the satirical magazine Punch

Thomas Cubitt completes Osborne House, designed as a quiet retreat for Victoria and Albert on the Isle of Wight

English photographer Frederick Scott Archer publishes the details of his collodion process, a marked improvement on the earlier calotype negative

English textile magnate Titus Salt begins to build Saltaire as a model industrial village for his workers

Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, built in London in six months, is the world's first example of prefabricated architecture