This chapter offers insights into the development of English-language literacy and publishing in nineteenth-century Ireland from the perspective of translation history. Making use of bibliographical surveys and nineteenth-century paratextual and metatextual materials, it touches upon the ideas of acceptability and selectivity in translation. Translation is considered not only in its relation to language learning, but above all in its relation to the political, religious and cultural currents of the age. In Ireland, translation contributed to the growth and dissemination of religious literature and children's fiction in English, as well as to the development of cultural nationalism. This essay considers translation within the social and cultural dynamics that contribute to mass mobilisation and the formation of a national identity, such as education, literacy and print culture. Notwithstanding the importance of commercial practices and interests that underlie the circulation of reading materials in the period under study, this contribution is especially concerned with the ways in which the production, circulation and reception of translations interconnect with questions of education, empowerment and moral reforms. The Nation, organ of the Young Ireland movement, offers worthwhile examples for this study, and this chapter makes use of several articles published therein. With a rise in English-language translations, the perpetual debate on ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ books increasingly involved discussions on ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ translations. In particular, attitudes towards French literature, above all French fiction, were extremely ambivalent. Translation occupied a critical, ambiguous place in the contemporary debates. Throughout the nineteenth century, various agents of translation contributed to the dissemination of what they identified as ‘good reading’ – an undertaking which also involved a selection of ‘good translations’. Translations are therefore situated within a set of discursive practices that encouraged reading and the acquisition of knowledge and moral virtue from books – but not from just any book. While the range of views and motivations expressed by translators, editors, publishers and journalists on the subject of translation at the time should certainly not be reduced to a mere binary, translation nevertheless lay at the heart of a debate on the morality of literature, and on ‘good books’ vs ‘poison literature’, a debate which proceeded unabated for decades, even centuries.