As Alan Richardson has explained, late eighteenth-century children’s writers thought of “the child’s mind as a text in process.” As he puts it, “the child consumer of ‘moral’ fiction learns, above and beyond any discrete ethical lesson, to conceive of its own life in terms of a succession of moral narratives based on those…presented in the tales it reads.” This process is clear not only from the ways in which these texts suggest that they themselves be used but also through their representations of reading. It is significant that writers who highlight the importance of experience in the formation of the self also find a central place for narrative in that process. In doing so, they are challenging Rousseau’s advice that a child should learn primarily from direct experience or a tutor’s example (famously, the only book Émile is allowed to read as a child is Robinson Crusoe). In particular, inset tales, with their accompanying commentary, provide examples of “real” as opposed to “false” sensibility, transformative reading moments, and models for communal reading that will produce not only virtues such as benevolence but also child readers who are themselves authors. Focusing on works by Charlotte Smith, I will show how the literature of sensibility was used in children’s literature to encourage the production of sympathetic citizens active in the public sphere.