Thomas Bowdler

Biography

Thomas Bowdler was born on 11 July 1754, in Box, near Bath, Somerset, the youngest son of the six children of Thomas Bowdler (c. 1719–1785), a banker of substantial fortune, and his wife, Elizabeth, née Cotton (d. 1797), the daughter of Sir John Cotton, 6th Baronet of Conington, Huntingdonshire. Bowdler studied medicine at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, where he received his degree in 1776, graduating with a thesis on intermittent fevers. He then spent four years travelling in continental Europe, visiting the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, Italy, Sicily and Portugal. In 1781 he caught a fever in Lisbon from a young friend whom he was attending through a fatal illness. He returned to England in broken health and with a strong aversion to the medical profession. In 1781 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (LRCP), but he did not continue to practise medicine. He devoted himself instead to the cause of prison reform.

Bowdler was a strong chess player and once played eight recorded games against the best chess player of the time, François-André Danican Philidor, who was so confident of his superiority that he played with several handicaps. Bowdler won twice, lost three times, and drew three times. The Bowdler Attack is named after him.

Bowdler's first published work was Letters Written in Holland in the Months of September and October 1787 (1788), giving an eye-witness account of the Prussian invasion of Holland. In 1800 Bowdler took a lease on a country estate at St Boniface, on the Isle of Wight, where he lived for ten years. In September 1806, aged 52, he married Elizabeth Trevenen (née Farquharson), aged 48, widow of a naval Captain James Trevenen, who had died in Catherine the Great's service at Kronstadt in 1790. The marriage was unhappy and after a few years they separated. They had no children. After the separation, the marriage was never mentioned in the Bowdler family. The biography of Bowdler by his nephew, Thomas Bowdler, makes no mention of him ever marrying.

In 1807, the first edition of the Bowdlers' The Family Shakspeare, covering 20 plays, appeared in four small volumes. From 1811 until his death in 1825, Bowdler lived at Rhyddings House, overlooking Swansea Bay, from where he travelled extensively in Britain and Europe. In 1815, he published Observations on Emigration to France, With an Account of Health, Economy, and the Education of Children, a cautionary work propounding his view that English invalids should avoid French spas and go instead to Malta. In 1818, Bowdler published an expanded edition of The Family Shakspeare, covering all 36 available plays. This had much success. By 1827 the work was in its fifth edition. In his last years, Bowdler prepared an expurgated version of the works of the historian Edward Gibbon, which was published posthumously in 1826. His sister Jane Bowdler (1743–1784) was a poet and essayist. Another sister, Henrietta Maria Bowdler (Harriet) (1750–1830), collaborated with Bowdler on his expurgated Shakespeare.

Bowdler, at aged 70, died at Rhyddings near Swansea on 24 February 1825, and was buried at Oystermouth. He left bequests to the poor of Swansea and Box. His large library of unexpurgated volumes of 17th and 18th century tracts, collected by his ancestors Thomas Bowdler (1638–1700) and Thomas Bowdler (1661–1738), was donated to the University of Wales, Lampeter. In 1825 Bowdler's nephew, also a Thomas Bowdler, published Memoir of the Late John Bowdler, Esq., to Which Is Added, Some Account of the Late Thomas Bowdler, Esq. Editor of the Family Shakspeare.