Bowdler, Thomas (1754-1825)

English editor. His expurgated versions of Shakespeare and other authors gave rise to the verb bowdlerize.

In 1818 he published the Family Shakespeare, in ten volumes, in which ‘those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’. In 1826 he edited Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ‘with the careful omissions of all passages of an irreligious or immoral tendency’. His prudery was much ridiculed.