April 1

In spite of the bad rap it gets, April 1st must not be exclusively for fans of pranks because on that day in 1826, Samuel Morey[i] patented the internal combustion engine, in 1854, Charles Dickens[ii]’ book Hard Times[iii] began serialization in the magazine he was editing, Household Words[iv], and in 1857, Herman Melville[v] published The Confidence- Man: His Masquerade[vi].

[i] Morey’s first patent, obtained in 1793, was for a steam-powered spit. On his death, on April 17, 1842 Morey held twenty patents.
[ii] As a 12 year old, Dickens would spend ten-hour days in a boot-blacking factory pasting labels on jars of polish. The money went to help support his family because his father had been tossed in to Marshalsea, a debtors’ prison in London, England
[iii] The 100,000 words of the novel were serialized between April 1 and August 12, 1854.
[iv] Sales of the magazine Household Words, of which Dickens was the editor, were disastrously low and he serialized the novel in the hope that it would boost sales,
[v] Such was Melville’s fame in his own day, that when he died on September 28, 1891 and the venerable New York Times published his obituary they got his name wrong. It was not Herman Melville who had died it was Henry Melville.
[vi] The Confidence Man was Melville’s last major novel. I’m certain that it was merely a coincidence that its publication date is also the date in which all the action in the novel occurs.