Some children are very backward in a love of reading, which may mean merely that their own vivid imagination is enough for them, and that they tell themselves stories far more brilliant and congenial than any every written or printed. Other children fall victim to the magic words, and love Hiawatha or the Psalms; whilst a third class care only for stories about little boys called Bobby and little girls called Margery. (Mortem, in Hardyment, 1995, p. 147)

This commentary not only creates space for children’s agency in how they may take up literacy practices, but from a multi-vocal perspective also suggests that there was increasing attention and concern to not only what children read, but also if and how children made reading part of their childhood experience. Whether they promoted or cautioned against teaching children to read at an early age, these varied opinions and advice texts suggest intense interest and preoccupation with the topic on the part of educators, social commentators, and perhaps also parents.

The views of the popular Ellen Key, a Swedish social commentator and social reformer who was a vocal supporter of women’s suffrage, opponent of child labour, and other “evils of industrialization,” were a flashpoint for the conflict emerging between the ideals of schooling and the ideals of domesticity and maternalism. Key was an influential voice on both sides of the Atlantic against the movement toward state crèches and Kindergarten, which she regarded as a threat to European culture and rights of children in the “children’s century” (Key, 1909). She called for a renewed focus on domestic pedagogy, but not to prepare children for school but rather to protect them from it.

My first dream is that the kindergarten and the primary school will be everywhere replaced by instruction in the home. …[W]hat I regard as a great misfortune is the increasing inclination to look upon the crèche, the kindergarten and the school as the ideal scheme of education. (1909, p. 233)

In Key’s ideal new century, “the children will be taken from the school, the street, the factory and restored to the home. The mother will be given back from work outside, or from social life, to the children” (p. 164). For Key, Kindergartens could be available only to children from unfortunate circumstances and whose mothers, for reasons of “weak will or depression” (1909, p. 234), could not educate her children herself. She advised that from the first years of life children should have a well-chosen library of suitable books for each age, rather than the “many worthless children’s books” and costly toys (p. 168), but that otherwise, children should be left to their own imaginings, given a substantial amount of independence, and taught to do much for themselves. These “new homes” for the “new century” required a women’s movement that embraced the power of motherhood to change the world. Such mothers would be educated in the latest pedagogical theories and child-raising tenets, such as “an understanding of heredity, race hygiene, child hygiene and child psychology” (Key, 1912, p. 121).