Filme do Dia: Der Traum des Bildhauers (1907), Johann Schwarzer

It is of course Dickens who most acutely imagines what it would be like to be an illiterate creature in a world full of letters, signs and advertisements:

"It must be a strange thing to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of the streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language - to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo does think, at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me? (Bleak House, 1853, ch. 16)

(Philip Davis, The Victorians, pp. 234-5)