| 1859 | 30 April | The first issue of Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round, is published in London |
| 22 May | Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle is born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Mary and Charles Altamont Doyle |
| 26 November | Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White begins its serialization in Charles Dickens’s weekly literary magazine, All the Year Round |
| 1860 | August | Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White is published in three volumes by Sampson Low & Son, London |
| 1861 | 14 December | Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, dies at Windsor Castle |
| 1863 | 10 January | The London Underground first opens for business offering service between Paddington and Farringdon Street |
| 26 October | The Football Association is formed |
| 1867 | 5 March | Fenian Rising in Ireland |
| 1868 | 26 May | The last public hanging in Britain occurs outside Newgate Prison |
| Fall | Conan Doyle begins two years of studies at the Jesuit-run Hodder Place preparatory school at Stonyhurst, near Clitheroe in Lancashire |
| Fall | Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone is published in three volumes by Tinsley Brothers, London |
| 1870 | 9 June | Charles Dickens dies at Gads Hill Place in Higham, Kent, England |
| Fall | Conan Doyle matriculates at Stonyhurst College and continues his studies under the Jesuits |
| 1871 | 26 January | Rugby Football Union established |
| 1 November | The sale of commissions in the British Army is abolished |
| 1875 | | Conan Doyle completes his studies at Stonyhurst and pursues a year of post-graduate studies at Stella Matutina, a Jesuit school in Austria |
| 1876 | | Conan Doyle matriculates at the University of Edinburgh as a medical student |
| 1877 | 1 January | Queen Victoria is proclaimed Empress of India |
| 1878 | 7 April | The Metropolitan Police Service’s Criminal Investigations Department is established by Charles Howard Vincent |
| 25 May | Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore premieres at the Opera Comique, Strand, London |
| 21 November | Second Afghan War begins |
| 1879 | 22 January | A British invading force is annihilated by a Zulu army at the Battle of Isandlwana and B Company of the 24th Regiment of Foot barely survives an engagement at Rorke’s Drift that lasts throughout the following day |
| 4 July | British forces decisively defeat the Zulu nation at the Battle of Ulundi |
| 9 September | Conan Doyle’s first published work, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” appears in Chambers’s Journal |
| 20 September | Conan Doyle’s first work of non-fiction, “Gelsemium as a Poison,” is published in the British Medical Journal |
| 1880 | Summer | Having completed his classroom studies in medicine, Conan Doyle takes a position as a doctor on a Greenland whaler |
| 2 August | Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is adopted as the standard time thro... |
