Charles Dickens publishes his tenth novel, Hard…

Charles Dickens publishes his tenth novel, Hard Times, in 1854, beginning serialization in his magazine, Household Words, on April 1; he had begun writing it on January 3.

Hard Times is one of a number of state-of-the-nation novels published in England around the same time, another being North and South by Dickens’s friend Elizabeth Gaskell, which aims to highlight the social and economic pressures that some people are experiencing.

The novel is unusual in that it is not set in London as was Dickens' wont, but in the fictitious Victorian industrial town of Coketown.