I read a sentence in a chapter named "The Last Lesson" which was:
It was because they were sorry, too, that they had not gone to school more.
More is a comparative adjective. So I wonder in the sentence, it is not clear 'more than what?'. I think it has been used in a wrong way here and the author wanted to convey the sense of much. Am I right?
In this case, it's referring to the number of times they did go to school. The more is in comparison to whatever the reality of the situation actually is.
For instance:
However many vegetables you eat, you can always eat more.
Or, in the sentence in question:
It was because they were sorry, too, that they had not gone to school more [than they did].
The explicitly missing words are generally assumed to exist.
It was because they were sorry, too, that they had not gone to school more.
This is a grammatical sentence whose meaning is clear. When more is used this way - “they didn’t do X more” it means “they didn’t do X more than they did”. To be more explicit, for this particular sentence:
It was because they were sorry, too, that they had not gone to school more than they had gone to school.
It would be redundant to say (or write) that whole sentence; more by itself conveys this meaning.
not much is different - it just means “not a lot”. In this context they were probably sorry they had not gone to school much but we don’t know that for sure. Maybe they did go to school much of the time, but still regretted not going to school more than they did.
