Reviews for Dr. Bowdler's Legacy A History of Expurgated Books in England and America

The average rating for Dr. Bowdler's Legacy A History of Expurgated Books in England and America based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-30 00:00:00 Lavonne Curtis This is a very interesting subject, but a poorly written book. It traces the history of people modifying books to make them more "appropriate". The question is, appropriate for whom? People have been editing books for the last 200 years so that they are less offensive to the then-current society. Expurgation is not a good thing. Neither is censorship in books. If Shakespeare needs to be modified so that children can read it without becoming offended, then maybe children shouldn't be reading Shakespeare. There are plenty of good books for people of all ages to read that they would not find offensive. Everyone's opinion of offensive material is different, and there is no reason to change a book just so that everyone can read it. The author never intended it to be that way. I'll continue to read books that I don't find offensive. That may cause me to miss some of the "classics" and some of the popular books, but there is no need to change them just to avoid offending me.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-30 00:00:00 Casandra Franklin Kind of a slog to read here and there but interesting nonetheless. I had no idea that all those "Shakespeare plays for youth" in my school library could be considered to be bowdlerized. I even had a set of Shakespeare's works written in prose for the younger set which were half illustrations. Never thought twice about it. His chapter on Chaucer and how his Canterbury Tales were censored over the centuries, even up to the twentieth century, was intriguing. I took a high school elective course on The Canterbury Tales way back in high school, taught by a woman who was going for her PhD on Chaucer at the University of Pennsylvania. The stories were enjoyable but I certainly don't recall any passages that could remotely be considered racy. Now I'm going to have to order an annotated and UNexpurgated edition to read to see what all the fuss was about (beyond the few passages Perrin shares in his book). The trick will be to identify which edition hasn't been gutted.