unlettered

[…]that vnletered ſmall knowing ſoule[…]

c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Loues Labour’s Lost”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i], page 124, column 1

Hannibal, as a city, may have many sins to answer for, but ingratitude is not one of them, or reverence for the great men she has produced, and as the years go by her greatest son, Mark Twain, or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him, grows in the estimation and regard of the residents of the town he made famous and the town that made him famous.

1909, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], “Is Shakespeare Dead?”, in What Is Man? And Other Essays, New York, N.Y.; London: Harper & Brothers, published May 1917, page 374

They were short days, for into them were crowded many hours of insidious instruction of the unlettered child by the lonely woman.

1915 December 4 – 1916 January 8, Edgar Rice Burroughs, chapter XVI, in The Son of Tarzan, Chicago, Ill.: A[lexander] C[aldwell] McClurg & Co., published March 1917, →OCLC

But this Chapman girl will come to us wholly unlettered.

1919, Christopher Morley, “(please specify the page)”, in The Haunted Bookshop, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC

Thus, the oldest Price girl, Fanny, is plucked from her pack of siblings and, at 10 years old, largely unlettered, hypersensitive and extremely timid, the girl is thrust into the life of Mansfield Park, a great estate in the country.

2025 June 27, Lauren Groff, “Jane Austen’s Boldest Novel Is Also Her Least Understood”, in The New York Times, →ISSN