DR. BOWDLER'S LEGACY: A HISTORY OF EXPURGATED BOOKS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA by Noel Perrin. 296 pages. Atheneum. $7.95.
"Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene, and thank God, we are sufficiently advanced to have found it out!" Thus spake the pure—the ever so pure—voice of the born bowdlerizer. Self-congratulatory, combining limitless prudery with limitless zeal, the expurgator haunted the live authors of the 19th century, and the dead authors of every century previous. Without respect for reputation, he labored—blue stockings on his feet, blue pencil in his hand—to save the reading public from corruption and to save masterpieces (including the Bible) from themselves.
What could prompt an educated man to change Lady Macbeth's most famous line to "Out, crimson spot"? Or to excise mention of Queequeg's underwear from Moby Dick? In framing answers, Noel Perrin, professor of English at Dartmouth, takes as his point of departure Dr. Thomas Bowdler, who had a passion for chess and prison reform and an aversion to London smog, sick people, and all writing that, as he put it, "can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty." Certainly the Family Shakespeare (first edition 1807, second edition 1818) became the most popular expurgation in literary history. It gave Bowdler's name immortality as part of the language. But Perrin is up against not one man but a state of mind, and he has had the wit and learning to expand− his study into a brilliant little work of cultural history.
Licensed Hands. Delicacy, Perrin suggests, became an overrated virtue in the 19th century. No response rated higher than "being easily shocked." One proved one's sensitivity by one's blushes, as Dr. Bowdler indicated, and, if necessary, by fainting. It was clearly feminine behavior, and Perrin dares to hint that behind every successful bowdlerizer there is a woman. Perrin's real scoop, however, is the suggestion that the real Bowdler probably was not Thomas at all, nor his wife, but his sister Henrietta Maria, known as Harriet.*
What Perrin's survey makes alarmingly evident is that bowdlerizing could become almost as unbridled a lust as lust itself. An expurgator may begin quietly enough by "lopping" or "cutting." He might omit, say, Sodom and Gomorrah from Old Testament stories. But before he is through, he is likely to end up as a compulsive cleaner—"the sort of man who is capable of bringing out an expurgated edition of Wordsworth," as a Victorian clergyman with a penchant for editing was once described.
In fact, Chaucer ranks second to Shakespeare among the victims of bowdlerizing. The company is distinguished: Dryden, Pope, St. Augustine, Benjamin Franklin ("the leading native victim" of American bowdlerism), and, of course, Donne. "An easy test of what kind of college a student goes to," Perrin proposes, "is to quote the single line 'License my roving hands and let them go,' and see if his eyes light up."