In 'Popular Entomology and Anthropomorphism', Dodd notes that 'A collection of excerpts from contemporary reviews [of L. M. Budgen's Episodes of Insect Life] is to be found in the back matter of Alice Carey's Clovernook... where it is reported that "no work published during the year, has received so extensive and facourable notices from the British Quarterlies and Newspapers as the Episodes of Insect Life." Not only are the excerpts reproduced here exteemely favourable, but they also illuminate just what it was about this work that captured the imagination of readers in the United Kingdom and across the Atlantic... The Boston Post reported that "it is a beautiful specimen of book-making. The character of the contents may be already known to our readers from the long and very favourable attention they have received from the English reviewers. The illustrations are at once grotesque and significant." The Rochester Daily Democrat wrote, "The style is the farthest possible remove from pedantry and dullness, every page teems with delightful matter, and the whole is thoroughly furnished with grace and beauty, as well as truth. One giving himself over to its fascinating charms, might readily believe himself fast on to the borders, if not in the very midst of fairy land." The Ontario Repository called it "wonderfully beautiful, graceful and entertaining. Children can read it with understanding and be enraptured by it; and this is no small thing to say of a work not especially intended for juveniles." The Christian Intelligencer observed that "we have in this work deep philosophy and an endless flow of humour, and lessons set before us, drawn fron ants, beetles, and butterflies, which we might do well to ponder." Back in the United Kingdom, the Morning Chronicle had remarked that "the whole pile of Natural History - fable, poetry, theory, and fact - is stuck over with quaint apothegms and shrewd maxims deduced, for the benefit of man, from the contemplation of such tiny monitors as gnats and moths. Altogether, the book is curious and interesting, quaint and clever, genial and well-informed" - while the Sun had described how "never have entomological lessons been given a happier strain. Young and old, wise and simple, grave and gay, can not turn over its pages without deriving pleasure and information."'