Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English scientist Thomas Bowdler.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Thomas Bowdler, LRCP, FRS was an English physician known for publishing The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's plays edited by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler. They sought a version they saw as more appropriate than the original for 19th-century women and children. Bowdler also published works reflecting an interested knowledge of continental Europe. His last work was an expurgation of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published posthumously in 1826 under the supervision of his nephew and biographer, Thomas Bowdler the Younger. The term bowdlerize links the name with expurgation or omission of elements deemed unsuited to children, in literature and films and on television.
Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family.
I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.
Those expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in the family.