Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke set off from Bagamoyo in their search for the source of the Nile

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

Acts of exceptional valour in the Crimean War are rewarded with a new medal, the Victoria Cross, made from the metal of captured Russian guns

Burton and Speke reach Lake Tanganyika at Ujiji, a place later famous for the meeting between Livingstone and Stanley

Brunel dies just before the maiden voyage of his gigantic final project, the luxury liner The Great Eastern

The India Act places India under the direct control of the British government, ending the rule of the East India Company

Charles Darwin is alarmed to receive in his morning post a paper by Alfred Russell Wallace, outlining very much his own theory of evolution

Lionel Nathan Rothschild becomes the first Jew to sit in Britain's House of Commons, taking his oath on the Old Testament

US entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field succeeds in laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, but it fails after only a month

An Irish branch of the US Fenians is established as the Irish Republican Brotherhood

Speke reaches Lake Victoria and guesses that it is probably the source of the Nile

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

A 13-ton bell is installed above London's Houses of Parliament, soon giving its name (Big Ben) to both the clock and the clock-tower

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

Edward FitzGerald publishes The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, romantic translations of the work of the Persian poet

US artist James McNeill Whistler settles in London, which he makes his home for the rest of his life

Florence Nightingale opens a training school for nurses in St Thomas's Hospital, establishing nursing as a profession

Charles Dickens begins serial publication of his novel "Great Expectations" (in book form 1861)

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