BOWDLER, THOMAS (1754-1825), editor of the "fam ily" Shakespeare, was born at Ashley, near Bath, on July II and died at Rhyddings, south Wales, on Feb. 24 1825. In 1818 he published The Family Shakespeare "in ten volumes, in which nothing is added to the original text ; but those words and ex pressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family." Bowdler also expurgated Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1826).
From Bowdler's name we have the word to "bowdlerize," first known to occur in Gen. Perronet Thompson's Letters of a Rep resentative to his Constituents during the Session of 1836, printed in Thompson's Exercises, iv. 126. The official interpretation is "to expurgate (a book or writing) by omitting or modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive." In the ridicule poured on the name of Bowdler it is worth noting that Swinburne in "Social Verse" (Studies in Prose and Poetry, 1894, p. 98) said of him that "no man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children."