In 1857 James Fitzjames Stephen noted that ‘The age in which we live has produced, amongst other novelties, an entirely new school of politicians. […] In politics, in law, and in twenty other walks of life, reforming has become a distinct branch of business.’ In this article Stephen launches an attack directed at the fiction of Charles Dickens, whom he accuses not only of knowing absolutely nothing of politics or law but of ‘a very active fancy, great powers of language, much perception of what is grotesque and a most lachrymose and melodramatic turn of mind, and that is all’. This is utilitarianism's answer to fancy, Justice Stephen accusing Dickens of an irresponsible use of the imagination to overturn the rational world of the law with the disorder of the topsyturvy. This is in fact the objective that Dickens explicitly set this out as his rationale for establishing the journal Household Words, ‘to help in the discussion of the most important social questions of the time’ when he noted that ‘no mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to grim realities’ would deter the magazine from ‘cherish(ing) that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast’. As a forum for exposing problems within the delays and procedures of the courts and the reality of marriage, Household Words was the first of a number of periodical publications that became powerful agents for mediating and influencing public opinion and contributing to discourse that directly influenced social change.