| Themes across advice discourses | Intensive mothering | Domestic pedagogy | The normal family |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mothers as domestic literacy managers | Mothers’ influence on children’s characters is profound. This character may be judged in large part by children’s reading practices. Victorian mothers of the bourgeoisie were to display untiring patience with respect to their children’s questions and their presence in the home was essential to upholding literacy values of the Christian home. | Literacy is embedded in women’s everyday work in the home. For artisan or “cottage” mothers this work emerged from their “everyday living” but would become oriented to schooling in advice later in the nineteenth century. For mothers of the bourgeoisie, this work involved monitoring the work of nurses, nannies, and governesses, and modeling appropriate literacy behaviours. | Family reading bonds the family and creates domestic bliss and the cultivation
of Christian values. This ideal is dependent upon gendered divisions of literacy work. Ideally, it was mothers’ role to see to everyday learning. Fathers were “special guests,” reading to the family at the end of his day. |
| Moral structuring of literacy: Teaching children to read and write | Children learn to read by being read the Bible and scriptures often and repetitively. They also learn from their siblings, nurses, nannies and others in the household. Emphasis on reading as a performative ritual, not an intellectual pursuit. | Reading was directly taught through games and lessons with the alphabet in homes of upper classes, and through modeling upper class practices for “cottage” mothers and families. Requires leisure time for upper class mothers and ‘no extra time’ for ‘cottage’ mothers. | Children in bourgeois Victorian home learn to read “as naturally as they learn to eat.” This ideal family setting provides appropriate reading materials and leisure to read to and with children often.“Pauper” families could not and should not teach their children themselves. |
| Dangerous practices: Women’s and children’s literacy | Women’s reading interests and practices should prepare them for, but not detract them from, duties of wife and mother. | Reading the Bible, and other “approved texts” was an essential part of daily life, marking routines and cycles of family and social time that also required monitoring and regulation. | Women readers posed dangers to the ideals of the Christian family. Debate over how much literacy was enough to model domestic literacy, but too much to take mother away from her roles as wife and mother |