French author Émile Zola publishes The Fortune of the Rougons, the first in a 20-novel series that he calls Les Rougon-Macquart

Stanley, finding Livingstone at Ujiji, greets him with four words which become famous – 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'

George Eliot publishes Middlemarch, in which Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage to the pedantic Edward Casaubon

Whistler begins to paint his Nocturnes, a revolutionary series of night-time images on the river Thames

The Ballot Act adds to the British electoral system the essential element of secrecy in voting

The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin splits the International Congress into rival camps at its meeting in the Hague

Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud move together to Brussels, and then to London, where they live a dissolute bohemian existence

Verlaine is sentenced to two years in prison, at Mons in Belgium, after shooting and wounding Rimbaud in a drunken rage in Brussels

French painter Edgar Degas finds inspiration in the onstage and backstage world of ballet dancers

Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov has its premiere in St Petersburg

Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus has its premiere in Vienna

A group of French artists, including Renoir, Monet and Degas, exhibit their work independently in the Paris studio of the photographer Nadar

French critic Louis Leroy uses the term 'impressionism' to ridicule Monet's Impression, Sunrise, and unwittingly names a movement

Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, at the age of 70, begins a 6-year term of office as Britain's prime minister

Major Walter Wingfield secures a patent for Sphairistike, a game he has developed at his home in Wales, from which lawn tennis evolves

Mussorgsky composes Pictures at an Exhibition as a piece for piano in memory of an exhibition by the Russian painter Victor Hartmann

English author Thomas Hardy has his first success with his novel Far from the Madding Crowd

Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt has its premiere in Oslo, with incidental music by Edvard Grieg

The return to Spain of Isabella's son, as Alfonso XII, offers an end to forty years of royal feuding

Georges Bizet's opera Carmen has its premiere in Paris and meets at first with a lukewarm response

Charles Stewart Parnell takes his seat in the House of Commons at Westminster and immediately adds zest to the campaign for Home Rule

William Crookes invents the radiometer, in which light causes four vanes to rotate in a bulb containing gas at low pressure

Leo Tolstoy publishes the first volume of his novel Anna Karenina, in which the heroine develops a fatal love for Count Vronsky

After spending much time in Europe in recent years, Henry James moves there permanently and settles first in Paris

Benjamin Disraeli buys for Britain a controlling share in the Suez Canal, with money borrowed from Lionel Nathan de Rothschild