Literacy advice must also be located in the broader themes of nineteenth-century advice literature. Flint (1993) observed that “many Victorians wrote of reading as an activity as natural, as essential, as eating, supplying the food of the mind” (1993, p. 50). While there was considerable advice to parents for supporting and regulating children’s reading, often literacy advice was interspersed with, and at times embedded in, the attainment of other more pressing social ideals. These included instilling Christian moral values in children, preparing women for their status and influence as mothers, maintaining social status, pleasing husbands, and managing servants. Particular emphasis was placed on easing women’s pain and suffering in the almost inevitable event that at least one of their children died in infancy. These tracts are heart-wrenching and full of pathos, and are themselves powerful forms of literacy designed to comfort mothers and provide a cultural frame for bearing what their writers recognized as excruciating suffering. It is thus important to read this literacy advice against the backdrop of other mothering preoccupations, with an appreciation for the ways in which official literacy discourses inter-twine with and organize the literacies of everyday living.

The role of mothers as managers of domestic literacy was a dominant theme in advice. This term was originally used by Robbins (2004) to denote mothers’ roles in promoting children’s literacy in the domestic sphere, as a function of the “everyday” work of socializing children into the meanings and uses of print, which was distinct from more direct or formal reading instruction. The term “domestic literacy” is adopted in this study to capture the “everydayness” of mothers’ literacy work. Reinforcing Graff’s work, another theme in this advice was the connection between the moral structuring of literacy and competing views about how should children learn to read. The belief that women’s and children’s literacy practices were potentially ‘dangerous” is a third, and perhaps most prevalent, theme in the advice analysed.

The Nineteenth Century was characterized by significant social and economic shifts that may more accurately be linked to the important processes of industrialization, immigration, and the rise of universal public schooling than with any specific date or time. Consequently, the analysis is divided into two parts to capture and compare the distinct social and historical contexts for literacy advice in the first decades of the Nineteenth Century, to those of the later Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Table 3 summarizes the intersection between these mothering discourses and literacy advice themes.