The Christian Socialism of F.D. Maurice and others is mocked by its opponents as 'muscular Christianity'

The Christmas issue of the Illustrated London News includes chromolithographs, introducing the era of colour journalism

After a siege of nearly a year the Russians abandon Sebastopol, but the Turkish alliance is too exhausted to pursue the conflict

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

The treaty of Paris ends the Crimean War, limiting Russia's special powers in relation to Turkey

The first Neanderthal man to be discovered is unearthed by quarry workers in the Neander valley, near Düsseldorf

Victoria and Albert complete their fairy-tale castle at Balmoral, adding greatly to the nation's romantic view of Scotland

Gustave Flaubert publishes Madame Bovary, a novel of frustrated romanticism in a provincial French context

English chemist William Henry Perkin accidentally creates the first synthetic die, aniline purple (now known as mauve)

David Livingstone urges upon a Cambridge audience the high ideal of taking 'commerce and Christianity' into Africa

Russian exile Alexander Herzen, publishes in London a radical newspaper called Kolokol (The Bell)

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

French chemist Louis Pasteur proves the existence of micro-organisms by showing that a liquid will only ferment if exposed to contamination from the air

Charles Baudelaire publishes his first and extremely influential collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal

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

Napoleon III and Cavour hatch a secret plan at Plombièes to tempt Austria into war in north Italy, and agree how to divide up the spoils

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