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Matching the big-name victims are some big-name bowdlerizers. Lewis Carroll planned some tidy mutilations in his unfinished The Girl's Own Shakespeare, intended for his favorite age group (10-17). No bowdlerizer has ever confessed to any problems for himself. Almost all have declared it their duty to save their inferiors from temptation —meaning, of course, the young and the lower classes.
As the passion for expurgation galloped, even the synonyms for bowdlerizing got bowdlerized. "Castrate" and "geld," commonly used to describe their trade by early expurgators, gave way to "purge," "prune," and "chasten." Finally reaction had to set in. The purity market really went out of big business, Perrin figures, with World War I.
Yet he assumes that the source emotion of bowdlerism is still very much with us: "Delicacy has never died," he says, "and never will.'"Meanwhile, the practice still goes on, now catering to different sensibilities. The 1885 bowdlerizer of Huckleberry Finn who changed "in a sweat" to "in such a hurry" has been replaced by an enlightened 1960s model who transforms "a nigger woman" into "one of the servants."
The new standard of delicacy is more admirable. But the implicit point of Perrin's book is to make the whole process of text-tampering appear a loser's game. If so, the classic, frightening example to all future bowdlerizers would have to be the editing of Matthew Prior* who approached the line, "You've thrust your finger God knows where!" blushed, and serenely revised it to read: "You've thrust your finger — — knows where!"
* A literary spinster of Bath, Harriet anonymously created the first edition. When Thomas brought out the second edition, he got credit for both. * Prior is often quoted as the author of the quite unbowdlerizable epigram: No, no; for my Virginity,
When I lose that, says Rose, I'll die:
Behind the Elms, last Night, cry'd Dick,
Rose, were you not extreamly Sick?