Martineau’s views contrasted rather sharply with the prevailing concern surrounding women’s and children’s reading practices. For households that possessed books, she argued against censoring children’s texts “with pencils and scissors” or fretting about the time children spent reading, observing that children, like adults, would grow in and out of the reading habit as their lives changed, and what they didn’t understand of the passions in books they would discard rather than be unduly influenced (Martineau, 1848, pp. 86–88). Such views were not shared in the Mothers’ Magazine, although this popular magazine often cited her Home Education in other places. With reference to the debate over the regulation of children’s reading practices, one commentator exclaimed: “They tell us the proper way is to allow them to read what they please … Mistaken guides! They know not what they do” (Mothers’ Magazine, 1861, p. 145). In the 1872 American magazine The Little Corporal, an article titled “What Does Johnny Read?” admonished a proud father who boasted that his Johnny “read everything he could get his hands on”:

And we should like to say to Johnny’s father and mother, do not rest satisfied while your boy “reads every thing.” It is a direful day for you if you have neglected to direct and cultivate his taste until he has come to be a mere devourer of stories of wild, improbable adventure and exciting fiction, which is poured out like a flood for the destruction of our boys; but even yet you can do something to counteract the evil if you are willing to work for it — by taking your child into the fields of art, of history and of science, which may be made as charming to the unfolding mind as regions of romance. (The Little Corporal, 1872, p. 34)

The relationship between literacy advice and the gender essentialism that underpinned Victorian and Edwardian philosophy and science has proven to be a strong discursive thread throughout this analysis of literacy advice to mothers. Lady Schultz, in her 1895 address to the National Council of Women of Canada titled “How to provide good reading for children,” pitched her speech to a sympathetic middle-class audience as she articulated the continued close association Victorians made between reading as an embodied practice, and a moral social code. This is expressed in metaphors of books as food, or poison for the soul: “For there is no greater agency in the world in building up or destroying character than the books read; it is, to a great extent, the pabulum on which the mind is fed” (Shultz, 1895, p. 3). Her warnings of the consequences of correct reading practices alluded to Biblical images of doom and disease:

And I urge upon the parents, at the same time, to be as vigilant in guarding what their children shall read as though the child was to pass through a plague-stricken country and could only escape by the most watchful care of the mother or guardian. (Schultz, 1895, p. 11)