Grundy, Mrs.

Censorship of language and morality takes both official and unofficial forms. In addition to the Master of the Revels and the Lord Chamberlain, there have been various significant individuals who have simply taken up the role of self-appointed supervisor of public morals. These included a number of Puritans who attacked the Elizabethan stage, covered in the entry for Renaissance, and Jeremy Collier, who launched a similar work, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698. Though all were regarded as extremists, they had considerable impact on the thought of the time, but none had influence extending beyond their own era.

The figure who acquired genuine institutional force was a curious successor, the mythical Mrs. Grundy, an imaginary character in a long-forgotten play, Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plough (1798). Though Mrs. Grundy never actually appears on stage, she is still able, in absentia , to exercise her influence, particularly over one vulnerable character, Dame Ashfield, who persistently asks the anxious question, “What would Mrs. Grundy say?” A typical exchange in the play (which is written in dialect) is as follows:

Dame Ashfield: If shame should come to the poor child [her daughter]—I say, Tummas, what would Mrs. Grundy say then?

Farmer Ashfield: Dom Mrs. Grundy; what wou’d my poor wold heart zay? [Damn Mrs. Grundy; what would my poor old heart say?]

The question became proverbial, and Mrs. Grundy came to be what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “a personification of the tyranny of social opinion in matters of conventional propriety,” or what would now be called the voice of disapproving bourgeois morality. Unlike her predecessors, who founded their arguments on religious objections, Mrs. Grundy was an entirely secular figure of social conformity. Her formidable influence is reflected in the subsequent semantic growth of Grundyism (1836), Grundyites (1845), and Grundyist (1883). Various major authors referred disparagingly to her: Tennyson commented sourly on “the Grundyites” (in his Memoirs of 1897, I, 227), while Thomas Hardy was more direct in the New Review (January 19, 1890), rejecting a work as “Unreal and meretricious, but dear to the Grundyist and subscriber.”

Mrs. Grundy’s successors were various influential individuals who were by no means offstage characters. The first was the Bowdler family, Elizabeth, Harriet, and Thomas, whose principal enterprise was the expurgated Family Shakespeare (1807). In the United States the spirit of Grundyism was personified in the career of Anthony Comstock, the cam- paigner against obscene literature. The most recent and successful has been Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, who started a campaign “Clean Up Television” in 1964. Mrs. Grundy is now a largely passé historical figure, but her influence lives on, both in the form of active campaigners and in the more elusive spirit of self-censorship.