In the absence of 'rational books' designed for children, pupils at Christ's Hospital read chapbooks during recreation hours. For Scargill's schoolboys, chapbooks function rather as social glue, counterbalancing a curriculum of rote memorization and Latin recitation. Romantic writers belonged to the first generations raised on Newbery's books and the self-consciously literary, book-centred and commercial forms of children's writing Newbery inaugurated. Newbery's The Fairing offers highly assorted literary fare: poems, nursery rhymes, cautionary tales, song lyrics, allusions to Henry Fielding, Shakespeare, Edward Young and other Newbery books. An anonymous 1820 London Magazine essay, 'The Literature of the Nursery' echoes Lamb's lament. In the early nineteenth century, the renewed commercialization of children's literature created new anxieties about the propriety of juvenile reading and the status of the book as personal property. Romantic children's literature idealizes mothers, nurses and school-mistresses as agents of literacy. Other Romantic children's books postulated deferral as the precondition, price and psychic reward of literacy.