Thomas Bowdler (and Bowdlerization) on This Day in History

 

This Day in History: English doctor Thomas Bowdler died on this day in 1825. He is best known for publishing The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's plays, and by "expurgated" I mean that he published a cleaned-up "G-Rated" version of Shakespeare that would not cause offense to polite society. To this day, the word bowdlerise (or bowdlerize) is linked with censorship or the omission of elements deemed inappropriate for children, not only in literature but also in motion pictures and TV shows.

Books today are approvingly Bowdlerized when race is involved, as is seen with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and certain works by Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling etc. Even a counting rhyme such as "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" had to replace a certain word with "Tiger."

The Hebrew translation of Green Eggs and Ham had to remove the word Ham because of Jewish dietary law.

Some early fairy tales were changed to remove the violence and rape.

The classic poem "Twas the Night Before Christmas" was edited by a Canadian writer to omit references to Santa puffing on his pipe.

The Bible itself has been Bowdlerized. In 1782 Sarah Kirby Trimmer published her "Sacred History" which condensed the Bible to about half of its size for the use of children. John Bellamy's "Holy Bible Newly Translated" (1818) offered more "wholesome" translations...after all, we can't have Noah getting drunk at Genesis 9. Benjamin Boothroyd (1824) and William Alexander (1828) produced their own Bowdlerized Bibles without the nasty bits. Modern Bibles still have some expurgations. The Hebrew idiom at 1 Samuel 25:22, "any that pisseth against the wall" is translated as "any male", unless you are using the King James Bible, Catholic Douay Bible or the older New World Translation. The Divine Name (YHWH / Jehovah / Yahweh) though occurring about 7000 times is simply translated with the titles LORD or GOD in most Bibles (except the New World Translation, New Jerusalem Bible, American Standard Version 1901 and any Interlinear Bible). Other famous examples of Bowdlerized Bibles are the Thomas Jefferson Bible and the Readers Digest Bible.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fahrenheit 451, and even the Hardy Boys are other books that have been tampered with.

Chapman Cohen wrote in 1907 that Bowdlerization "is a policy that places a premium upon mediocrity and a tax upon ability and courage. It is a policy that is both cowardly and dishonest; cowardly because it of necessity only attacks the dead, and dishonest because it puts into the hands of uninformed readers a book that is not the work of the person whose name it bears. If a book is worth possessing, let us have that or nothing. No one wants—or no one ought to want—Shakespeare filtered through the mind of a Bowdler, or some other classic doctored by a publisher anxious to please the more uncultured section of the public."

See also Over 200 Banned, Controversial and Forbidden Books on DVDrom