illiterateness

But the extreme illiterateness and indocility of this maid are surprising, considering that she wants not inquisitiveness, appears willing to learn, and, in other respects, has quick parts.

Clarissa Harlowe 2006

You have suffered yourself to speak with contempt of the generality of the Italian women, for their illiterateness: let not their misfortune be imputed to them, my noble friend, as their fault.

Sir Charles Grandison 2006

We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.

Walden 2004

And the reason that I have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, the more I see of our national faults and miseries, the more they resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiterateness, and want of education in the most ordinary habits of thought.

Harvard Classics Volume 28 Essays English and American Various

This mysterious document, which is still extant, is written in a feigned hand, with an affectation if illiterateness and in the obscurest of styles.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 7: Gregory XII-Infallability 1840-1916 1913

” And the reason that I have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, the more I see of our national faults and miseries, the more they resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiterateness, and want of education in the most ordinary habits of thought.

Sesame and Lilies. Lecture I.-Sesame: Of Kings’ Treasuries 1909

Besides Russian, which, contrary to the national illiterateness then current, she wrote correctly, she knew four other languages, French, German, English, and Italian, and was probably sensitive to art.

Leo Tolstoy: Childhood and Early Manhood 1906

It was a vegetating sort of existence, and the writers of the following age bear testimony to the illiterateness and coarseness of manners which prevailed towards the end of the seventeenth century, even among the gentry of the country districts.

Christian Singers of Germany 1869

None can quote Abraham Lincoln in justification of boorishness, of illiterateness, of opinionativeness, of uppishness, as prerogatives of a self-made man; nor can his name and life be used as in any sense an argument against that culture of society and of the schools of which he scarcely knew, until he had attained his majority.

Abraham Lincoln; His Life and Its Lessons 1865

We are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.

Walden, or Life in the woods 1854