Some people think that a text — a book of fiction, for example, or the script for a play — is one complete thing, and that each constituent part, whether it’s a passage or just a single word, must be left as-is or the message and nature of the whole is changed. Others think of these things as more like a big basket of apples, where each apple is an individual word. If you see an apple you don’t like, you can just remove that individual bit and what you have overall is still a big basket of apples — not really changed very much.
The history of literary censorship can be seen as a pattern of leaning from one side to the other in that consideration. Sometimes, in some places, schoolchildren are thought to be better off if they read, for example, Huck Finn only after the “bad words” have been removed. Other times — sometimes in the same places, too — Huck Finn is considered fine just as it is, and the “bad words” are accepted as necessary components of the concinnity (oh, have I done “concinnity” yet? Well just wait…).
In 1836, Thomas Thompson published Exercises, Political and Others, which included this bit: “Among the names..are many, like Hermes, Nereus..which modern ultra-christians would have thought formidably heathenish; while Epaphroditus and Narcissus they would probably have Bowdlerized.” In 1883 the Church Times opined that “…[Henry IV] is Bowdlerized, to be sure, but that is no evil for school purposes.”
Note that “Bowdlerized” in both instances is capitalized — that’s a hint that it might be based on someone’s name, which is exactly what it is. In late 1818 Thomas Bowdler published The Family Shakespeare, and explained that “My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of Shakespeare 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…” (he went on at some length, pointing out that he was protecting young minds from “the danger of being hurt with any indelicacy of expression…”
In other words, Shakespeare’s was the first body of work to be “Bowdlerized.” The ten-volume set of The Family Shakespeare was roundly ridiculed for heavy-handed editing that badly reduced the quality of the plays. And Bowdler himself was roundly criticized for prudishness — even though it turned out later that most of the editing was actually done by his sister Harriet (whose name might have been Henrietta). The modern version of the word “bowdlerize” — which is still in occasional use, but isn’t capitalized any longer — first appeared in that 1936 citation from Thomas Thompson.
Just because The Family Shakespeare was laughed at, by the way, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t popular. It continued to be published until the 1860s, and went through five editions. And even today the Reader’s Digest, which publishes Bowdlerized articles and books, is still being published regularly (I think).
Leave a Reply