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'

The Falkland Islands, by now occupied by some 2000 settlers, become a British colony

Mr Pooter is the suburban anti-hero of the The Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith

An aluminium statue of Eros, by English sculptor Alfred Gilbert, is unveiled in Piccadilly Circus

The Independent Labour Party, later changing its name to the Labour Party, is founded in Britain by the trade unionist Keir Hardie

Gladstone finally gets a Home Rule bill through the Commons, only to have it rejected in the Lords

Frank Hornby patents in Liverpool his Meccano construction system for children

The Gaelic League is founded to restore the use of Gaelic as Ireland's spoken language

The Scottish game of shinty is provided with a standardized set of rules

Gladstone retires as Britain's prime minister and his place is taken by his foreign secretary, Lord Rosebery

French-born artist and author George du Maurier publishes his novel Trilby

Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book surrounds the child Mowgli with a collection of vivid animal guardians

Scottish physicist William Ramsay isolates argon, following Rayleigh's discovery that an undiscovered gas combines with nitrogen in the air

Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, is convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana

Oscar Wilde's most brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest is performed in London's St. James Theatre

Scottish chemist William Ramsay isolates the element helium

Oscar Wilde loses a libel case that he has brought against the marquess of Queensberry for describing him as a sodomite

Oscar Wilde is sent to Reading Gaol to serve a two-year sentence with hard labour after being convicted of homosexuality