Charles Dickens didn’t write Hard Times as a novel — at least not at first — but as a serial story, with individual chapters published in the journal Household Words. That constraint forced Dickens to tighten up his characters, drop his characteristic humor, and, in the words of one of the Hard Times characters, “stick to the Facts.” This made Hard Times fundamentally bleaker than some of his other works, and arguably better.

On this day, April 1, in 1854, the earliest chapters of Hard Times first appeared in the weekly Household Words journal, of which he was the editor. It was a tremendous success, and the journal’s circulation doubled as a result of Dickens’ story.

As with his other works, Dickens wrote about what he knew best: the effects, usually negative, of the Industrial Revolution on the populace. Parliamentary bills expanded enfranchisement somewhat, but the majority of the poorest classes still had effectively no representation and were working long hours for subsistence pay. Hard Times was one of several “State of England” novels written at the time, along with Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (published in 1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850).