Martin Fone's Blog

Thomas Bowdler (1754 – 1825)

There is a fine distinction to be drawn between political correctness and censorship. I sometimes find when I am reading literature from a century or so ago, I come across sentiments and expressions of language which make me blanche but I shrug my shoulders, mutter “different times, different strokes” and pass on. Some, though, can’t resist picking up the red crayon and excising the passages that offend. One such was Thomas Bowdler, a doctor, chess player and prison reformer, who gave his name to the curious habit of changing an author’s original intent.

Bowdler’s aim was to protect the sensibilities of women and children from any form of moral turpitude that may be lurking in the mellifluous lines of William Shakespeare. He hacked and edited his way through the Bard’s literary corpus, publishing in 1818 The Family Shakspeare – it was retitled The Family Shakespeare in subsequent editions and I wonder whether the errant e had offended his highly strung sensitivities. It ran to 10 volumes and followed on from an earlier attempt with his sister, Henrietta, in 1807 to straighten out and improve twenty of the Bard’s plays.

An advert announced the publication of the Family Shakespeare and gave a clear statement of Bowdler’s aims and methodology. “My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of Shakspeare, some defects which diminish their value; and, at the same time, to present to the public an edition of his Plays, which the parent, the guardian, and the instructor of youth, may place without fear in the hands of the pupil; and from which the pupil may derive instruction as well as pleasure; may improve his moral principles, while he refines his taste; and without incurring the danger of being hurt with any indelicacy of expression, may learn in the fate of Macbeth, that even a kingdom is dearly purchased, if virtue be the price of acquisition.”

The 1807 edition saw the removal of about 10% of the text. In the 1820 edition some of the original excisions were restored but also hacked out other passages which had escaped his attention – perhaps he blamed his sister. Some of the changes simply substituted blasphemous language such as God or Jesu with the more anodyne Heavens but some of the alterations were more drastic and had a significant impact on the characters and plot. Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet became a case of accidental drowning and in Henry II the prostitute, Doll Tearsheet, disappeared completely. Lady Macbeth’s “Out damned spot” became “Out crimson spot” – not quite the same and not something dog haters could ever contemplate saying. Measure for Measure and Othello were so offensive to Bowdler that they were printed with the warning that they were “unfortunately little suited to family reading.”

What Bowdler didn’t do was add to the Bard’s works, something earlier editors did with gay abandon. Bowdler was the wielder of a black crayon and nothing more. Bowdler’s approach to protecting weaker minds – culminating in Mervyn Griffith-Jones’ rhetorical questions in the Lady Chatterley trial, “Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” – was taken up with gusto in the 19th century and there were over 50 expurgated editions of Shakespeare. One of the benefits of learning Ancient Greek was to read the bawdy Aristophanes as he wrote it rather than in the rather tame Bowdlerised translations.

Bowdler also had a go at the works of Edward Gibbon, although his version was not published until after his death. The first person to use the verb bowdlerise to describe this curious form of expurgation was the politician, Thomas Perronet Thompson, in an essay in 1836, later published in his 1842 blockbuster, Exercises, political and others.

Bowdler certainly made his mark.