I honestly don't know how I came upon this during one of my regular jaunts through the Wikipedia wormhole. The title caught my eye and the premise seemed amusing.

The character of the shrewish wife is a rather stale one, and yet, the text reminded me how often I find myself delivering a 'lecture' to my partner before bed; it's so incredibly soothing and prepares one marvellously for sleep. Indeed, Mr and Mrs Caudle both seem to find the curtain lectures a wonderful soporific, for almost all end in one of the pair snoring away.

The book does come dangerously close to being repetitive - perhaps too close for some readers, though I still found it superior to Diary of a Nobody, with which it shares a particular type of humour.

The further I delved into the lectures, the more I found them an interesting mode of commentary on the circumscribed world of a particular class of Victorian womanhood. Beneath the comedic overtones there was something terribly sad about the very clear dependence of Mrs Caudle on Mr Caudle, and yet something touching, too, about the way Mr Caudle seems to (in a perverse way that is very human) enjoy and even encourage his wife's spirited lectures on his character.