A post-script.
Joan Bodger’s How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books includes some wonderful passages about reading to children. Bodger’s two children, Lucy, 2, and Ian, 8, are interesting “readers” because they neither of them (yet) fit the profile of bookish children. Lucy is too young to read, and Ian does not read well.
What I loved about Bodger’s portrayal of her children was her faith that constant exposure to books and reading would eventually make them readers.
We cannot claim erudition for our children, but books, conversation, games, genes, and osmosis had made Anglophiles of them. Lucy, aged two and a half, knew her nursery rhymes, having learned them from Randolph Caldecott’s Picture Books and L. Leslie Brooke’s Ring o’ Roses, both illustrated with scenes from English country life. She also knew Brooke’s Johnny Crow’s Garden and she had pored over the pictures in his Golden Goose Book and his illustrations in A Roundabout Turn by Robert H. Charles. When she was very young indeed she had been introduced to A. A. Milne’s Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin, and she was quite well acquainted with the world of Beatrix Potter. It would be another twelve-month before she began to read, but could one truly say that she was illiterate? (xi)
Ian, almost nine, worried his teachers because he was a better listener than he was a reader, but he had managed to assimilate and accumulate an astonishing amount of lore. He was, in his way, as fond of history as his father, who holds a Ph.D. in the subject. He seemed unable to make anything of the mysteries of Dick and Jane (authors mercifully anonymous) but he liked to listen to Beowulf (also anonymous). (xi)
She describes Ian’s bond with Robert Louis Stevenson:
Ian took especial pleasure in the fact that Louis liked old maps, pirates, knights, toy soldiers, elaborate games of history and make-believe, just as he himself did. Of course, Ian may like all these things because we read Stevenson to him at such an early age. It is hard to tell. Another bond was that Louis, even as Ian, had difficulty in learning to read. Both little boys had been incessant listeners, almost from their births. Both could soak up reams of poetry and folklore, they were both interested in “adult” history and-on some occasions-would listen to newspaper articles or editorials. Both could dictate long, involved, and quite coherent stories of their own. But when it came to actually reading or writing they were the despair of school teachers and far behind their fellows. Ian was just issuing from the dread labyrinth that represented his first few years at school, and it was a comfort to him to know that his hero (his friend, really) had suffered even as he. (196)
Nathalie Foy 
I love the comment about Ian being a better listener than reader. At much the same age my teachers begged my mother to stop reading to me as they said if she didn’t I might never become an independent reader. Tosh! I could read very well, but who wanted to read the rubbishy, boring, repetitive primers they offered me. Thanks to my mother, I knew what real literature was like. Why would I spend precious reading time ploughing my way through the ‘adventures’ of dear old Dick and Dora?
I read this years ago but feel, now, as though I must have missed something. Perhaps I read it “out of time”, as Doris Lessing might say. You’ve encouraged me to try again!