Bowdlerize is named for the wrong Bowdler
A retired doctor took the credit for his sister's expurgated Shakespeare, and English turned his name into the verb for sanitizing a book while passing it off as the author's own.
To expurgate a text by omitting or modifying whatever is judged indecent or offensive, while presenting the cleaned result as the original work.1
A Shakespeare to read aloud
In 1807 a new edition of Shakespeare appeared in England with no author's name on it: twenty of the plays in four small volumes, promising in its preface to "remove every thing that could give just offence to the religious or virtuous mind."1 It was printed quietly in Bath.2 Every play stayed recognizable; what went were the lines a careful father would skip while reading to his children. The book was called The Family Shakespeare.
The sister who did the cutting
The name that finally attached to the project was Thomas Bowdler, a physician who had abandoned a medicine he disliked for charitable and literary work.2 The 1807 expurgation, though, was his older sister's. Harriet Bowdler, already a published author, did the original editing and let the book appear anonymously, because a woman of the period could not admit in public that she had understood Shakespeare's indecencies well enough to cut them.3 The quiet Bath edition found few readers until Thomas took the work over, expanded it to thirty-six plays across ten volumes, and had it reissued in London in 1818 under his own name.3 That edition promised on its title page that "nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family."4 Roughly a tenth of Shakespeare's lines were gone.3 Within a decade of Thomas's death in 1825, English had turned his surname into a verb.1
What it means to bowdlerize now
The verb outlived the book because it names something the plainer words for editing miss. In 2023 the publisher Puffin issued new editions of Roald Dahl's children's books with hundreds of small changes. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Augustus Gloop was no longer "fat" but "enormous"; in The Twits, Mrs Twit went from "ugly and beastly" to simply "beastly."5 The publisher called the changes "small and carefully considered" and added a note that it "regularly review[s] the language."5 The covers still said Roald Dahl. That is the act the word marks, and commentators reached for it at once: "the latest victims of bowdlerization," one wrote, "are the children's books of Roald Dahl."6
The line the word holds
This is why bowdlerize survives beside its neighbours. To abridge a book is to make it shorter and say so.1 To censor is to suppress by an authority's power. To redact is to black a passage out where the reader can see the gap. Each of those edits is visible. To bowdlerize is to change the text quietly and keep offering it as the thing itself, so a reader meets a cleaned Dahl or a decent Shakespeare believing it is the whole.5 Harriet Bowdler thought that service a kindness. The word her brother's name became keeps the account honest: it marks the edit that hopes not to be noticed.
Sources
- Merriam-Webster · bowdlerize
- Folger Shakespeare Library · Molly G. Yarn, from Shakespeare's 'Lady Editors'
- Wikipedia · The Family Shakespeare
- Online Etymology Dictionary · bowdlerize
- The Daily Beast · Katie Hawkinson, "Roald Dahl's Books Rewritten"
- City Journal · Theodore Dalrymple, "Bowdler's Return"