Thomas Bowdler

Thomas Bowdler (born July 11, 1754, Ashley, near Bath, Somerset, Eng.—died Feb. 24, 1825, Rhydding, near Swansea, Glamorganshire, Wales) was an English doctor of medicine, philanthropist, and man of letters, known for his Family Shakspeare (1818), in which, by expurgation and paraphrase, he aimed to provide an edition of Shakespeare’s plays that he felt was suitable for a father to read aloud to his family without fear of offending their susceptibilities or corrupting their minds. Bowdler sought to preserve all Shakespeare’s “beauties” without the “blemishes” introduced (he supposed) to please a licentious age. Bowdler also prepared an expurgated edition, published in 1826, of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Although criticized for tampering with Shakespeare’s text, Bowdler deserves credit for making the plays known to a wide audience. The word bowdlerize, current by 1838 as a synonym for expurgate and now used in a pejorative sense, remains his most lasting memorial.