A Maria Monk excerpt: her early education.

I started reading the famous 1836 pseudonymous anti-Catholic work "The Awful Disclosures, by Maria Monk, of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal". It's trashtastic. I'm like a 100 pages into it and I can't put it down, which is more than I can say for any book I've ever read from the first half of the 19th century. Here's about her early education (pp. 13-14, 1977 Arno Press Reprint Edition):

I have a distinct recollection of my first entrance into the Nunnery; and the day was an important one in my life, as on it commenced my acquaintance with a Convent… There were about fifty girls in the school, and the nuns professed to teach something of reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. The methods, however, were very imperfect, and little attention was devoted to them, the time being in a great degree engrossed with lessons in needle-work, which was performed with much skill. The nuns had no very regular parts assigned them in the management of the schools. They were rather rough and unpolished in their manners, often exclaiming, “c’est un menti,” (that’s a lie,) and “mon Dieu,” (my God,) on the most trivial occasions. Their writing was quite poor, and it was not uncommon for them to put a capital letter in the middle of a word. The only book on geography which we studied, was a catechism of geography, from which we learnt by heart a few questions and answers. We were sometimes referred to a map, but it was only to point out Montreal or Quebec, or some other prominent name, while we had no instruction beyond.

The uneducated state of Catholics is a standard point, as well as their veneration of objects and their strict obedience to priests. Maria Monk is all made up, though, but I love the details, like how the nuns who were teaching wrote capital letters in the middle of words.