biography
pronunciation:
[bowdler]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1754–1825)
|
| biography:
| Doctor and man of letters, born in Ashley, Somerset, SW England, UK. He retired from medical practice and settled in the Isle of Wight to devote himself to literary pursuits. He is immortalized as the editor of The Family Shakespeare (10 vols, 1818), in which ‘those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’ and which are ‘unfit to be read by gentlemen in the company of ladies’. Bowdlerizing has since become a synonym for prudish expurgation. |
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