Bowdler’s Return

In 1807, Harriet Bowdler edited The Family Shakespeare, a version of the Bard from which anything vaguely salacious had been expunged. Her brother, Thomas, did the same for Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, thus giving the English language a delightful new verb: to bowdlerize, that is, to remove supposedly offensive language from a literary work, thereby weakening it and reducing its impact.

I remember a time when we laughed at the Bowdlers, and the bowdlerizers, as being absurd, prissy, and prudish. We thought that, being fully mature for the first time in human history, we had overcome both the need and the impulse to bowdlerize. How wrong we were.