An important source for the advice literature consulted was the database of collected works of Victorian advice published by Adam Matthews (1996) entitled Women and Victorian Values, 1837-1910: Advice Books, Manuals and Journals for Women. I searched for references within these texts to “education,” “reading,” and “young children.” A second strategy to identify advice texts to include in the analysis was to integrate a literacy lens into existing histories of child-raising advice to mothers conducted by Ehrenreich and English (1978) and Hardyment (1995). From these histories, I identified authors and texts that were widely read and deemed influential to the formation of social ideals surrounding ideal mothering. I then sought out the original versions of these texts and analyzed them for references to mothers and fathers roles in supporting children’s literacy development. Although the bulk of the advice was directed to mothers, particularly through magazines in the last half of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, advice to fathers for supporting their children’s reading did exist and offered important insights into the discursive shifts in that advice as gendered divisions of labour became increasingly entrenched by the Twentieth Century.

The analysis cuts a large swath through a vast and intricate body of literature. Its interpretations are therefore confined to the texts that were included in the analysis, which, while representative of advice literature in general, could not include all the examples within the waves of domestic advice literature that appeared in Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century.

Before embarking on the analysis, a few comments on nineteenth-century meanings and uses of the term literacy are warranted. What did it mean to be “literate” in early Victorian culture? The term literacy is not used in Victorian advice texts; in fact it did not appear until the 1980s in popular child-raising manuals. It was the practice of reading, and not that of literacy per se, that was of most concern to Victorian social commentators and writers of advice texts. On the rare occasions when advice was offered to promote (or regulate) children’s writing, the term spelling was most often used, and reading and spelling were the dominant terms used to refer to what would later be termed literacy.

As Graff (1979) pointed out, and the literacy advice in these texts suggest, official discourses surrounding the social uses of literacy emphasized ritual and morality, rather than emancipation or intellectual growth. According to Graff, the emphasis on the “performance” of particular literacy practices as markers of culture and social status meant that “[t]he level of literacy, in fact, could be quite low: a proper understanding of the words was not in itself essential. Literacy, however nominal, signified in theory the observance of an ordained and approved social code” (Graff, 1979, p. 24).