You and I, you know, have often watched the delicate way in which the hen feeds her chickens, how she breaks the crumbs, and how she teaches them to scratch the ground, and seek in the little morsels suited to them; and lets them run when they are weary, and calls them again when ready, to give them a little more; and how she gathers her brood to rest, giving time to digest the food under her fostering wing.” (Author Unknown, 1845, p. 55)

As Green (2001) suggested in her analysis of the cultural conflicts that were associated with educating Victorian women, the pressure to bring about changes to the abysmal state of education for women in the 1840s and 1850s was prompted in large measure by the shortage of women capable of providing the educational services families required.

The customary occupation of such women, that of being governesses, was destined to make them fail in the dual task of earning a living while maintaining their appropriate role as reproducers of the domestic ideal. Their inadequate education made them ill-fitted to teach others and it also left them ill-fitted to earn their living in any other way. (Green, 2001, p. 11)

The fact that literacy advice included strategies for managing the domestic literacy of other people’s children suggests how women were differently positioned in literacy advice discourses according to strict regimes of social class. The position of the governess as domestic literacy manager was regulated by her employer, and by the standards set by the moral ideals embedded in domestic literacy instruction.

The emphasis placed upon literacy as part of the work of the domestic sphere suggests the importance of reading such advice with attention to the socially situated meanings and uses for literacy in different domestic settings, as well as historical construction of a literacy habitus as indivisible from the ideals of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy. In this way, advice not only promoted literacy, but also promoted gendered divisions of labour within emerging ideals of the “normal family.” It is insightful to bring these lenses to the themes in advice concerned with why and how children should learn to read.