Saturday, June 07, 2025
Expurgating great literature
As this website recounts Thomas Bowdler received notoriety as a 19th century English author of "The Family Shakespeare," volumes of William Shakespeare's work rewritten in a more polite language for the Victorian English public.
Effectively he expurgated all the rude words of Shakespeare saying: "My object is to offer these plays to the public in such a state that they may be read with pleasure in all companies, and placed without danger in the hands of every person who is capable of understanding them."
The word "Bowdlerised" was coined in 1836, after his death.
His last work was an expurgation of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published posthumously in 1826 under the supervision of his nephew and biographer, Thomas Bowdler the Younger.
My encounter with the man came when our English teacher instructed us to restore the deleted parts of Hamlet in the school textbooks, dictating the passages we were to write as he did so.
I was astonished therefore, after settling in Swansea, to discover Bowdler's grave while researching a walking tour of Mumbles. The inscription is faded but the find-a-grave website renders it as follows:
Sacred
To the memory of
Thomas Bowdler, Esqr.
Youngest son of Thomas Bowdler, Esqr.
of Ashley Near Bath
Born at Ashley July 11, 1754
and died at Rhyddings Near Swansea
Febry 24, 1825
He was a sincere member of
the established Church of England
Putting away lying, speak every
man truth with his neighbour for
we are members one of another
Ephes. Chap IV, Verse 25
