In recent years, some prominent scholars and historians of reading have emphasized the gradual nature of change in reading practices in the early modern period as opposed to sudden transitions. This article discusses the varying opportunities to acquire skills consequent on "engaged reading" (defined below) available to the children of different social groups in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The author suggests that the children of well-off city dwellers with a "worldly" outlook on life (that is, those less influenced by the Calvinism which had dominated the Interregnum) had greater opportunities to acquire these reading skills than the godly (often Nonconformists) and the poor. The urban middle classes could afford to buy their children a significantly greater range of reading material for unsupervised recreational reading, and those of them with a worldly outlook were ideologically inclined to permit such reading. The lower class rarely had the means available, and the godly discouraged engaged reading for ideological reasons, even where they had the means to support it. Engaged reading was defined for the OECD as varied, frequent, recreational and happening regularly over many years in childhood. Engaged reading through childhood is important because it permits (after many years) a level of competence which is not available to non-engaged readers.