The Victorian era of 'proper' culture was built on a lie
In short: We often associate the Victorian era with strict moral policing and the sanitization of art. But the famous practice of 'bowdlerizing' literature—removing anything deemed unsuitable for the family parlor—was actually a clever deception. The man credited with this cultural gatekeeping wasn't even a Victorian, and he didn't do the work himself.
The Victorian age is frequently defined by its transition from realism and romanticism toward the radical shifts of modernism. However, a core component of its cultural identity was the policing of public and private morality. This is best exemplified by Dr. Thomas Bowdler, the editor of The Family Shakespeare. Bowdler's goal was to create a version of the classics where nothing 'improper' could be read aloud at home. This involved removing references to specific body parts, expunging derogatory remarks about clergy, and deleting entire characters, such as the prostitute Doll Tearsheet, who were popular subjects for illustrators like Thomas Rowlandson.
The mechanism of this censorship was a strategic negotiation of values. For instance, in Othello, Bowdler removed the core plot of adultery—which he deemed unsuitable for families—while retaining the play as a vehicle for the Christian lesson that adultery is a crime secondary only to murder. He even produced a sanitized version of Edward Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire, stripping out chapters that attacked Christianity. His nephew later noted that these edits were so thorough that the text could no longer provoke a blush or a pang in a devout reader.
The historical reality of 'bowdlerization' reveals a deeper layer of social performance. While posterity credits Bowdler, he did not actually perform the edits; his sister, Harriet, did the work. The pair chose to attribute the work to Bowdler because they believed a woman could not be trusted to understand the sexual allusions of Shakespeare or the lascivious footnotes of Gibbon. Furthermore, Bowdler died in 1825, meaning his work predates the Victorian era entirely, despite it becoming a hallmark of Victorian cultural standards.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: The Victorians: Art and Culture - Professor Richard J. Evans
- Also: The Victorians: Art and Culture
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