The Second International is established by the Socialist parties of ten nations, meeting at a congress in Paris

The tone poem Don Juan, by the 25-year-old Richard Strauss, has a passionately mixed response at its premiere in Weimar

English musicologist George Grove completes publication of his four-volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Austrian composer Gustav Mahler conducts the premiere in Budapest of his first symphony, described as a 'symphonic poem'

Charles Steward Parnell is cited as co-respondent in a divorce case brought against Kitty O'Shea

The Fabian Society publishes Essays in Socialisman influential volume of essays edited by Bernard Shaw

Sleeping Beauty, with choreography by Petipa to music by Tchaikovsky, has its premiere in St Petersburg

A vast cantilever bridge, spanning a mile of water, carries the railway across the Firth of Forth in Scotland

The new young German emperor, Wilhelm II, dismisses the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck

Henrik Ibsen publishes his play Hedda Gabler, with its powerfully manipulative central character, a year before it is first produced (in Germany)

The world's first electric underground railway passes under the Thames, linking the City of London and Stockwell

Scottish anthropologist James Frazer publishes The Golden Bough, a massive compilation of contemporary knowledge about ritual and religious custom

9-year-old Daisy Ashford imagines an adult romance and high society in The Young Visiters

Britain cedes the tiny island of Heligoland to Germany in return for vast areas of Africa

A Gaelic pressure group, the Highland Association, is founded to preserve the indigenous poetry and music of Scotland

German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal achieves the first of many guided flights in a glider, from a hill near Potsdam

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