Indeed, Martineau felt strongly that books were but one path to learning and children’s happiness was more important than their book learning. Given that literacy rates in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s hovered between 40% and 50% (Vincent, 2000), it was necessary to promote domestic learning that was not print based. William Cobbett (1830) similarly expressed ambivalence about the importance of books in children’s lives and maintained the importance of happiness. Yet, the fact that commentators felt the need to remind parents of these priorities suggests the importance that was placed on children’s literacy abilities. Indeed, Cobbett dedicated significant space to children’s reading in his advice to fathers. In the tradition of advisors drawing on their own experiences to provide advice, Cobbett described his approach to encouraging children to read in his own home:

I never ordered a child of mine, son or daughter, to look into a book, in my life…I never, and nobody else ever, taught any one of them to read, write, or any thing else, except in conversation. …I accomplished my purpose indirectly. A large, strong table, in the middle of the room, their mother sitting at her work, the baby, if big enough, set up in a high chair. Here were ink-stands, pens, pencils, India rubber, and paper, all in abundance, and every one scrabbled about as he or she pleased. There were prints of animals of all sorts; books treating of them: others treating of gardening, of flowers, of husbandry, of hunting, coursing, shooting, fishing, planting, and, in short, of every thing, with regard to which we had something to do. One would be trying to imitate a bit of my writing, another drawing the pictures of some of our dogs or horses, a third poking over Bewick's Quadrupeds and picking out what he said about them. …What need had we of schools? What need of teachers? What need of scolding and force, to induce children to read, write, and love books? [emphases in text] (Cobbett, 1830, sec. 289–293)

This description is interesting in its attention to children’s choices of the kinds of literacy practices they chose to engage in, and the diverse forms of literacy that took place around this table. Indeed, the silence surrounding the mothers’ role, and the portrayal of Cobbett’s own benign presence, suggests a view of domestic literacy that contrasted with the more strict gender roles surrounding domestic literacy management suggested in advice later in the century. In Mothers’ Magazine in 1857, the ideal was that fathers’ influence over their children’s instruction was restricted to one of support for the mother, with the rationale that the domestic sphere was “constantly” inhabited by the mother, and fathers were often away from home and thus not suitable to the everydayness of teaching children to read.