Not a patch on our own Dear Mary

As Dear Mary so wittily demonstrates, our need for advice is perennial. But fashions change. Mary would probably take issue with The Handbook of the Toilette (1839), which advises that one should take a weekly bath whether one needs to or not, and also with the recommendation of Cassell’s Home Encyclopedia (1934) that ‘bloater cream’ makes excellent cocktail canapés. She would surely concur, though, with an observation from All About Etiquette (1879) that ‘a social party is not intended as a school for reform, or a pulpit to denounce sin’.

To compile How to Skin a Lion Claire Cock-Starkey has consulted the British Library. She promises ‘medieval manuscripts’, but her selection is mostly from Victorian sources. She has resisted the temptation to write a history of advice and self-help, which would have made for a much longer and more interesting work. Instead she has produced an intermittently entertaining, relentlessly random and occasionally useful toilet book.

Much of it concerns the killing of animals. Apparently a hippopotamus is best shot up the nostril. I had to skip the passage from Rowland Ward’s Sportsman’s Handbook (1923) about ‘How to skin a lion’, as I was reading in the company of my cat, but I was charmed by a story about some Boers on a lion hunt from R. Gordon Cumming’s A Hunter’s Life in South Africa (1850). When one of them was knocked to the ground by a lion, the rest of the party galloped away and fired at the beast from a distance, missing their target and bagging their comrade.

Edmund C.P. Hull’s The European in India (1874) is extensively quoted. He is sound on the matter of seasickness — ‘Champagne, Moselle, or sparkling hock, are often found to have an excellent effect in settling the stomach’ — but less so on how to rid a house of fleas.