Surveying the archive of late eighteenth-century children's literature, this dissertation argues that children's authors constructed a version of subjectivity based in the passions. Challenging the dominant Lockean model, these writers drew on Rousseau's theory of education and the discourse of sensibility to construct a “sympathetic self.” Children's writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, and Maria Edgeworth highlighted the role of pain and suffering in the creation of the self; in so doing, they reimagined the discourse of sensibility, promoting a selfhood that was collective, benevolent, and imaginative. Significantly, this “sympathetic self” was available to both sexes and to children. Unlike other versions of the self based on sensibility, it was not predicated upon femininity. Moreover, maturation did not depend on age, but rather on one's state of mind; any person educated through this sympathetic literature could be an adult and participate in civic society through, for example, charitable acts. This dissertation explores the roles providence, reading, and humor play in the construction of this “sympathetic self.” While accepting that empirical experience was important in shaping the self, children's writers foregrounded specific types. For example, they saw most experiences as God-given and thus as part of a divine plan. The agency their own works had was thus put in peril. On the other hand, they saw reading as having a profound effect on children and portrayed numerous child characters as being affected by touching or shocking stories. Finally, while surprising to us today, sympathy was not entirely about tears and charity—it was also about violent humor. Eighteenth-century children's writers employed a style of humorous didacticism to convey the lessons of benevolence and collectivity. Part of learning to read “sensibly” was learning to construct an impartial spectator who could reflect on one's other selves and other people. By reading children's texts next to educational and philosophical texts of the time, this dissertation arrives at a historically-informed understanding of their depiction of childhood and finally asks how childhood reading informed the reading of “adult” novels by Jane Austen. It ends by claiming that contemporary readers of Austen would have read her novels “didactically” and followed the structural patterns of the children's literature they grew up reading rather than seeing the irony we value today.