A literary life is a happy life, as Eliza Fenwick (1766–1840) makes clear in the title of her 1805 novel for children, Visits to the Juvenile Library: Knowledge Proved to be the Source of Happiness. There on the shelves of the actual early nineteenth-century children’s bookshop to which she alludes in the title – Tabart’s Juvenile Library on New Bond Street in London – both the knowledge and the happiness temptingly featured in the story are available for purchase. But it is not quite that easy: to be literate, it is first necessary to become literate. And therein lies the plot.

Fenwick’s novel centres on enticing five recently orphaned reluctant child readers into the rewards of a literary life. As they had been raised in Jamaica, the spoiled (White) children of plantation-owners, they had been accustomed to having an enslaved person attending to every whim. Because their early schooling had been at the hands of a sadistic ‘master’, they had learned to equate education in general and reading in particular with punishments typically inflicted on the enslaved. That is why, when they arrive in London, with their (enslaved) nanny, Nora, to the guardianship of ‘the good Mrs. Clifford’, as she is always called in the story, they want nothing to do with literate life. They are suffering, as the title of the first chapter clearly states, from ‘The Mistakes of Ignorance’, their misery stemming from the fact that they had never learned to be ‘excited to activity of mind or body’ (p. 7). In diagnosing their ills, the good Mrs Clifford notes that it is equally difficult ‘to rouse the curiosity of these children or to engage their affections’ (p. 5). Her challenge is to disabuse them of the idea that education is a form of punishment defined by ‘the terrors of rods, canes, dark closets and stocks’ (to use Nora’s terms), and to coax them into recognising being literate as a good thing (p. 15). In the novel, all ends happily as the children, and their enslaved nanny Nora, discover that becoming literate is physically, intellectually and emotionally rewarding. Teaching people to become literate has of course long been at the heart of the educational project, though the word ‘literacy’ itself did not come into being until 1883 (OED). It would have been alien to Eliza Fenwick and her late-Enlightenment contemporaries.