Bowdler, THOMAS

Bowdler, THOMAS, who has immortalised himself unhappily as the editor of the 'Family Shakespeare,' was born of wealthy parents at Ashley, near Bath, July 11, 1754. At sixteen, he went to St Andrews to study medicine, but graduated M.D. of Edinburgh in 1776, and after some years of travel, settled in London, devoting himself mainly to charitable work. He lived for ten years at St Boniface, Isle of Wight, and for the last fifteen years of his life at Rhyddings, near Swansea, where he died February 24, 1825. In 1818 Bowdler published 'The Family Shakespeare, in 10 vols.; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.' The work had a large sale, and was long popular, spite of the ridicule it brought down upon the head of its over-prudish editor, who has had the happiness or unhappiness to add permanently to the English tongue the word bowdlerism as a synonym for senseless expurgation. The last years of Bowdler's life were given to the task of preparing a purified edition of Gibbon's History, which was published in 6 vols. the year after his death, edited by his nephew, under the title: 'Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for the use of Families and Young Persons, reprinted from the original text, with the careful omissions of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency.' In a note, the editor says that 'it was the peculiar happiness of the writer' to have so purged Shakespeare and Gibbon, that they could no longer 'raise a blush on the cheek of modest innocence, nor plant a pang in the heart of the devout Christian.'