Leaving his family in Copenhagen, French artist Paul Gauguin returns to Paris to paint full-time

French painter Georges Seurat develops the dotted style of impressionism that becomes known as Pointillism

Gladstone becomes Britain's prime minister again, after joining forces with the Irish Nationalists to defeat Lord Salisbury's government

Dutch painter Vincent Willem van Gogh moves from Antwerp to Paris

Gladstone's bill promising Home Rule for Ireland splits the Liberal party in Britain's House of Commons

Robert Louis Stevenson introduces a dual personality in his novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

The split in the Liberal party over Home Rule results in a defeat for Gladstone and the return of Lord Salisbury as Britain's prime minister

The Home Rule campaign for Ireland prompts a Scottish Home Rule Association to fight in a related cause

German engineer Gottlied Wilhelm Daimler builds the first successful 4-wheel vehicle with an internal combustion engine

Thomas Hardy publishes his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the future mayor, Michael Henchard selling his wife and child at a fair

Joseph Conrad becomes naturalized as a British subject and continues his career at sea in the far East

Those in Britain's Liberal party opposing Home Rule for Ireland become a separate group under the name of Unionists

Sherlock Holmes features in Conan Doyle's first novel, A Study in Scarlet

Alexander Borodin dies without finishing his opera Prince Igor (completed later by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov)

Giuseppe Verdi's opera Otello has its premeiere at La Scala in Milan

A German physiologist, Adolf Fick, grinds a pair of lenses to fit snugly in contact with a patient's eyeballs

Lenin's elder brother Alexander, while still a student, is executed for his part in a plot to assassinate the tsar, Alexander III

Queen Victoria's golden jubilee brings her back into the public's affection

A gathering of leaders from the British empire holds a colonial conference in London to coincide with Queen Victoria's jubilee

Eadweard Muybridge publishes Animal Locomotion, a folio volume containing 781 pages of photographs

The Australian soprano Nellie Melba makes her operatic debut as Gilda in Rigoletto in Brussels

Vincent van Gogh invites Paul Gauguin to come and paint with him at Arles, in the south of France

An undetected murderer, slitting the throats of seven London prostitutes, becomes known by the public as Jack the Ripper

23-year-old Irish author William Butler Yeats publishes his first volume of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin

Vincent van Gogh enters a psychiatric asylum in St Rémy as a voluntary patient