Illustrated in the style of Boz, it contains a lot of sound advice: forget that organic nonsense: give them gin, tobacco, trifle and dunk them in leeches

Daily Telegraph Review, Books of the Year

For those who like their pregnancy and babycare advice with a good dose of tongue-in-cheek humour

Mother and Baby

This book is the perfect antidote to those preachy parenting tomes you occasionally come across that leave you feeling somewhat substandard when you consider your own slapdash parenting approach ... a wonderfully refreshing compendium packed full of facts and trivia that could certainly set the cat among today's parenting pigeons ... Just goes to show how much parenting techniques go in and out of vogue

Junior

Parenting advice from experts of the Victorian era. Chapters include how to discern which is the good twin and which the evil. The perfect look book

The Lady

[It] gives tongue-in-cheek advice from the likes of 'Gertrude Fjord-Mettod' and Queen Victoria, alongside advertisements for Bob the Empire Builder toys ('Can we annexe it? Yes we can!') and retro illustrations

Independent on Sunday