In the early 1800s, Englishman Thomas Bowdler published a now deservedly forgotten work called The Family Shakespeare. In a sustained fit of chivalry, Bowlder had set about improving the great man’s works for ladies and children by excising all indelicate words or replacing them with genteel alternatives.
Today, this meddler’s name lives on in the word bowdlerise, which means “to remove material that is considered improper or offensive from a text, especially with the result that the text becomes weaker or less effective”.
Anyone who’s been following the Roald Dahl debacle lately may already be anticipating the rant that’s coming. But first, a little etymology.
Bowdlerise is an eponym; that is, a word derived from a person’s name. The language positively brims with them, although they’re often hidden in plain view thanks to their progenitor having since faded into obscurity.
Other examples include caesarean (after Julius Caesar, who almost certainly popped out in the usual fashion), nicotine (after Jean Nicot, who holds the dubious distinction of having introduced tobacco to France), and beatlemania (after some pop group). If a work takes the artist’s name, it is said to be eponymous. REM played on this when they named one of their albums not REM, but Eponymous.
While bowdlerise now carries negative connotations, there is nonetheless a strong movement in western culture to revive Bowdler’s ridiculous practice. Which brings me to reports that the Roald Dahl Story Company and publisher Puffin recently hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of his stories to make them more accessible to young readers.
Reported changes, of which there are hundreds, include removal of the words fat and ugly. In some cases, the alternatives seem barely any less problematic: fat is replaced by enormous in at least one passage. Other passages have been completely rewritten to purge the text of problem words.
Predictably, a storm of protest has erupted. Spectator columnist Tom Slater wrote: “We live in infantilised times – in which speech, culture and even history is censored and rewritten to avoid rattling our brittle spirits.” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak criticised the “airbrushing” of literature and author Salman Rushdie described the move as “absurd censorship”.
I’m with them. Not because I oppose efforts to make writing - especially that intended for children - inclusive. I think that’s a splendid idea.
Nor do I object to a publisher refusing to print a work it deems offensive or asking an author to revise parts of a book for the same reason. In both cases, authorial control remains where it belongs: with the author.
But when someone rewrites a book penned many years ago by an author who is in no position (being dead, you see) to accept or reject those changes, something very bad is happening.
It is an insult to the reader, who has no way of knowing which words came from the author and which came from Jeremy in the Sensitivity Department.
It turns writing into a commodity, no different from a Subway sandwich. “You don’t like ‘fat’? No problem, try our new, plant-based alternative, ‘enormous’. You’ll hardly notice the difference.”
I’m among those who believe an author’s intention is sacred. To change their work even slightly and leave the author’s name on it is barbaric.
What’s more, if Jeremy’s main skill is avoiding offence, you can be confident he doesn’t have much of an ear for good writing. In fact, some of the rewritten Dahl passages attest loudly (and clunkily) to this.
In explaining the changes, The Story Company has stated they were “small -and carefully considered”. This is a horrific statement, a murderer pleading “I only stabbed him a bit and the knife wasn’t very big”. Small changes be damned: they’re often the ones that ruin a piece of writing.
This was beautifully articulated in 2008 by Giles Coren, restaurant critic for The Times, when a wayward editor made a unilateral change to one of his reviews. Here is the original:
“I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.”
The editor decided the penultimate word, “a”, was not needed. Mistaken they were, and blazing was Coren’s wrath. “This was shit, shit sub-editing for three reasons,” he wrote, before stating those reasons in withering prose. You can find them here. (It’s a rollickingly good read, let me tell you.)
Airbrushing an author’s work is no different than placing a fig leaf over Michelangelo’s David or deleting all the misogynistic slurs from The Sopranos. If you own those works and decide they are no longer acceptable, then stand by your principles and don’t display or distribute them.
In fact, this is what happened in 2021 when Seuss Enterprises stopped publishing a number of Doctor Seuss books that it said “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong”.
Some people excoriated the company for this, but I applaud them. It shows courage, decency, clear-mindedness, and a deep regard for the integrity of an author’s intention.
Qualities that I fear are in short supply at you-know-where.
Bits and specious
Bowdler was a strong chess player and even has a line of the Sicilian (2. Bc4) named after him.
After last week’s newsletter on serendipity, reader Martin Garrood introduced me to its near-opposite, zemblanity. This is an unhappy event that you should have seen coming or may even have caused yourself, much like England losing on penalties, Martin ruefully notes, at the last football World Cup. (Or a publisher “improving” a dead author’s work, I might add.) Zemblanity is the brainchild of author William Boyd, who coined it for his 1998 novel Armadillo.
Do you struggle to remember the difference between discrete and discreet? Ever wonder if you’re using comprise correctly? Download my free guide to commonly confused word pairs here.
Quote of the week
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
HG Wells
Good rant. Here I was thinking ‘bowdlerise’ meant delivering a wrong bias in lawn bowls