HMS Penelope was a central-battery ironclad built for the Royal Navy in the late 1860s and was rated as an armoured corvette.

[4] Penelope had a pair of Maudslay three-cylinder, horizontal-return, connecting-rod steam engines, each driving a single 14-foot (4.3 m) propeller.

[5] She carried a maximum of 500 tons of coal,[6] enough to steam 1,360 nautical miles (2,520 km; 1,570 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph).

[8] Provision for the hoisting frames and twin rudders forced a very unusual shape to the stern, which unintentionally greatly increased drag.

Her shallow draught gave her a metacentric height of 2.7 feet (0.8 m) at deep load, which made her a very steady gun platform.

[11] Penelope's main armament of eight rifled muzzle-loading (RML) 8-inch (203 mm) guns was concentrated amidships in a box battery.

[12] The shell of the 8-inch gun weighed 175 pounds (79.4 kg) and was rated with the ability to penetrate 9.6 inches (244 mm) of wrought-iron armour.

[19] In 1882, she was at Gibraltar under command of Captain St George Caulfield D'Arcy-Irvine[20] when the Anglo-Egyptian War began, and her shallow draught caused her to be sent to Egypt.

Upon arrival in Alexandria, she assisted with the evacuation of European refugees for several days before the bombardment of the city began on 11 July.

She became Rear-Admiral Anthony Hoskins's flagship when the British seized the Suez Canal to allow their troop transports to land at Ismailia.