Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck publishes his play Pelléas et Mélisande

The Nutcracker, with choreography by Lev Ivanov to music by Tchaikovsky, has its premiere in St Petersburg

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

The French chef Auguste Escoffier creates and names a dessert in honour of the Australian soprano Nellie Melba

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

Giacomo Puccini has his first success when his opera Manon Lescaut opens in Turin

De Lesseps, on trial for his management of the Panama Canal company, is sentenced to five years in prison

In Falstaff Giuseppe Verdi writes his last opera, and his only comedy since the early days of his career.

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

Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen sails into the Arctic in the purpose-built Fram, beginning a three-year expedition to reach the North Pole

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

Tchaikovsky's symphony no. 6, known as the 'Pathetic' or Pathétique, has its premiere in St Petersburg

Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky dies after a short illness, possibly from cholera or perhaps in sinister circumstances that remain the subject of controversy

Hansel and Gretl, an opera by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck, has its premiere in Weimar

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

France and Russia, alarmed by Germany's ambitions, sign a defensive Franco-Russian alliance

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

The Basque Nationalist Party is founded, beginning more than a century of separatist unrest in northwest Spain

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

Claude Debussy's tone poem L'Après-midi d'un faune has its premiere in Paris