Bowdlerisation

Her eighty-seven songs appeared first under the pseudonym ‘Mrs Bogan of Bogan’ or ‘B.B.’ in The Scottish Minstrel (1821–24), and posthumously as Lays from Strathearn. Not a few of them are mere Bowdlerisations of ‘indelicate’ favourites; but four at least live, and shall live, with the airs to which they are wedded—the exquisite ‘Land o’ the Leal’ (c. 1798), and ‘Caller Herrin’,’ ‘The Laird o’ Cockpen,’ and ‘The Auld House.’

In “The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth” (The Bodley Head; 16s.), Mr. Chamberlin deals very faithfully with a scandal that has nothing to do with sixteenth-century gossip about the Queen’s morals. It is a purely academic outrage: Froude’s Bowdlerisations of Gloriana’s good things, which the historian paraphrased loosely when he should have transcribed them accurately.

We began to debunk, with the aid of such Bowdlerisations of Freud as now trickled though, human motive, and learned to diagnose our mental discomforts as repressions and inhibitions—an accomplishment which gave me a good deal of relief.

There does not, up to now, exist any Talmud edition free from frequent blunders of copyists or from interpolations, Bowdlerisations and misunderstandings.

Tomas Bowdler, MD (1754–1825), published his Family Shakespeare in 1818. It was an “expurgated edition”. He went on, perhaps less influentially, to remove all sexual references from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Lewis and his colleagues suggest a similar semantic purification of the psychiatric literature, but their Bowdlerisations are neither consistent nor a profitable solution.

Simply on aesthetic grounds I can almost applaud the Victorians’ fig obsessed Bowdlerisation of Greek and Roman statuary.

Perhaps the most famous Bowdlerisation of nudity in art took place just 40 years after Titian had painted his freshly-cropped goddess, when Daniele da Volterra was ordered by Pope Pius IV to cover the naked genitals of figures in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, 1535–41, on a wall of the Sistine chapel, in wisps of painted cloth.