DR BOWDLER'S LEGACY

ISBN-13: 978-0333106983
Writer: Noel Perrin
Title: Dr Bowdler's Legacy
Subtitle: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America
Language: English
Place of Publication: London
Publisher:  Macmillan and Co Ltd
Year of Publication: 1970
Format: 150x223mm
Pages:  xvi+296; Appendix, 264; Notes, 271; Index, 288
Illustrations: 1  (writer's photo on the dust jacket)
Binding: hardcover in colour dust jacket designed by Holmes/Kitley Associates
Weight: 580 gr.
Original Price: price clipped by seller
Entry No: N/A
Entry Date:  N/A

BOOK DESCRIPTION

A delightful book for anyone who loves literature, likes the English language, hates to see them maltreated, and yer can be amused by man's absurdities. With tongue in cheek, Noel Perrin here examines the foibles of those who through the centuries have attempted to purify the Bible and other great books. The objective: that these work can be red safely by those whose sensibiities must be protected.

Although Dr Thomas Bowdler's activities in this area gave rise to the familiar verb "to bowdlerize", the science of castration of literature and  language antedates the late Georgian and early Victorian days of the good doctor and has lived from his time until now. The somewhat amateurish efforts of his sister to make Shakespeare readable inspired Thomas Bowdler; but Miss Harriet Bowdler was not the first to mutilate him, nor was Thomas the last. From the days of Cromwell on, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Swift, Defoe, Dryde and Robert Burns -among others- were maimed by those who thought to purify. And the death of Queen Victoria did not mark the end: some of our distinguised 20th-century scholars have produced bowdlerized editions of works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, which their authors (except for Mark Twain) would scarcely have recognized.

Mr Perrin has written a partial history of bowdlerism: the complete story would take up many volumes. But what he write here of the fate of the Bible, the classics, the Victorian poets, is both fascinating and horrible. The increasing severity of the bowdlerist at work tells us much about the miond of the Victorian and what he thought pure, what he ws sure was obscene.