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Dickens wrote to Forster on 14 March that he had felt, when reviewing the proposed contents for the second number of HW, 'an uneasy sense of there being a want of something tender, which would apply to some universal household knowledge'; looking at the stars during a journey on the railway ('always a wonderfully suggestive place to me when I am alone'), he found himself 'revolving a little idea about them' and, putting the two things together, wrote this piece 'straightway' (Pilgrim, Vol. VI, p. 65). It was given pride of place in the new number.

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This tiny 'filler' article, less than ten lines of a single column, is not mentioned in the Office Book, and would appear to have been inserted at the direction of the editorial team. Sir Richard Blackmore (1654-1729; DNB) was a doughty doctor and poet, physician to both William III and Queen Anne, and embroiled in numerous controversies over his writings, which were widely ridiculed--by Pope and Dryden among many others--but stoutly defended. His empirical approach to medical matters, and rejection of theory-driven medicine and scholasticism, are made clear in various treatises and essays. The furnishing of the quotation could be attributed to Dickens as editor or to W. H. Wills as sub-editor (trained physician Henry Morley had not yet started to write for Household Words) but the endorsement of the four-line commentary on it is almost certainly Dickens's.

'Happy Families', or collections of small animals and birds who were natural enemies shown living peaceably together in the same cage, were a popular form of street entertainment in the mid-Victorian period, one such show being elaborately described by Mayhew (London Labour and the London Poor [1861–2], Vol. III, pp. 214–19). This provides Dickens with a fine device for a general satire on contemporary squabbling over such matters as national education (bedevilled by sectarian rivalry) and ecclesiastical affairs, dubious social experiments such as the Pentonville Prison 'solitary system' [see 'Pet Prisoners', HW, Vol. I, 27 April 1850], Parliamentary conventions (more extensively ridiculed in 'A Few Conventionalities', HW, Vol. III, 28 June 1851), and the organised hypocrisy of 'Society'.

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