Bowdlerization

The publication of a text that has been expurgated, doctored, or castrated, to accommodate “family values,” following the practice of Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) and his family, who produced expurgated or sanitized texts of major works, most notably The Family Shakespeare (1807). The related eponymous terms are bowdlerize (1836), bowdlerism (1869), and bowdlerization (1882). Thomas’s learned mother, Elizabeth S. Bowdler, had already produced in 1775 her Commentary on the Song of Solomon Paraphrased . In this she objected to the word bed , preferring a euphemism such as “bridal chariot,” and commented on the amorous Bride’s effusion, “He shall lie all night between my breasts,” that this “would be impossible,” proposing that “he” should be changed to “it,” meaning a bundle of myrrh.

However, the practice of bowdlerism was already established well before the Bowdler family started to wield the blue pencil. Charles Wesley in 1744 published his Collection of Moral and Sacred Poems, from the most Celebrated Authors , in which about 100 poems have lines missing or substituted. Subsequent decades saw “pruned” or “purged” collections of poets as diverse as the Earl of Rochester, Abraham Cowley, and Matthew Prior. (Further details are to be found in Noel Perrin 1969.) In 1805 the publisher Tabart issued a Robinson Crusoe “Revised for the Use of Young Persons,” even though the original text is almost entirely innocent.

The year 1807 was a watershed year, with the publication of a parallel work of bowdlerism, Tales from Shakespear , by Charles and Mary Lamb. As the title suggests, it dealt more with the plot outlines of Shakespeare’s plays, but in a simplified and purified form, appropriate for children. Thus the barbaric curses that Lear unleashes on Cordelia are simply paraphrased: “The plainness of speech, which Lear called pride, so enraged the old monarch … that in a fury of resentment he retracted a third part of the kingdom.” In Romeo and Juliet the two major sources of bawdy, Mercutio and the Nurse, become virtually silent parts.

There is a distinction between bowdlerism proper, the acknowledged modification or paraphrasing of texts to avoid embarrassment in a juvenile or family audience, such as the Bowdlers and the Lambs produced, and the surreptitious doctoring or expurgating of texts. The date of these founding expurgating enterprises is significant, since bowdlerism is generally regarded as a symptom of Victorian prissiness and preciousness, but these volumes actually anticipated the Victorian era by several decades. However, expurgation certainly became established during the Victorian period.

In the United States one of the prime exponents of bowdlerism was Noah Webster (1758–1843), whose career in expurgating started with spelling books, continued with his famous dictionaries, and finished with his Bible (1833), of which he said: “I consider this … the most important enterprise of my life” (Perrin 1969, 133). The work showed Webster’s policy of replacing the franker Anglo-Saxon terms with the more opaque classical vocabulary. Thus, stink is replaced by “offensive in smell,” “putrify,” “ill savor,” and “odious scent”; Job’s poignant lament “Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?” is changed to “Why did I not expire at the time of my birth?”

Bowdlerism really took hold in the nineteenth century, with expurgated editions of major authors becoming de rigueur . The victims included the poets Geoffrey Chaucer, William Dunbar, John Donne, John Dryden, Robert Herrick, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, and Walt Whitman as well as William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, John Cleland, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Pepys, whose amazingly frank Diary was first published in 1848. Not all editors were draconian; some were simply deceptive. Thus James Paterson’s edition of Dunbar (1860) included terse , a Middle Scots word for “penis,” but glossed as “tail”; similarly swyfe was glossed as “sing and play” when in fact it meant “copulate.” Although most of these established authors were restored in the course of the twentieth century, many new books were banned or bowdlerized, a topic covered under censorship. Others were first banned and then expurgated. These included D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and his Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

Although bowdlerism is regarded as something of a joke from a contemporary “liberated” viewpoint, it has proved far more tenacious and widespread than is generally realized. Many works lacking any tincture of obscenity, some at the heart of the English literary tradition, are bowdlerized. It is only fairly recently that school editions of Shakespeare have become unexpurgated. An American study by James Lynch and Bertrand Evans, High School English Textbooks: A Critical Examination (1963) showed that all of the eleven prescribed editions of Macbeth were bowdlerized. Most editions of Gulliver’s Travels still excise the grosser physical details. In the United States hardly a year passes without some protest over prescribed school texts regarded as blasphemous or profane in some way.