Our friend Dave Lull has shared an article about the latest sign of the Apocalypse – the bowdlerization of the works of P. G. Wodehouse. The link he sent went to an article hidden behind a paywall, but my formidable investigative skills enabled me to locate a cognate report here, at National Review:
Wodehouse joins a growing list of prominent authors, deceased and living, whose works have been tinkered with by sensitivity readers, including Roald Dahl, R. L. Stine, and Agatha Christie. Penguin Random House, which recently relented to a degree on the Dahl edits, has released new editions of the Jeeves stories that include trigger warnings, the Telegraph reported.
The warning on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank You, Jeeves reads: “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated. In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”
It goes on to state that the changes do not affect the story itself. The 2022 edition of Right Ho, Jeeves has also been edited and features the same disclaimer.
The traditional word for this kind of activity is “Bowdlerization,” named for Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), an English physician and social reformer who’s most famous for producing The Family Shakespeare, in which he (and his sister) cleaned the offensive words out of the Bard’s plays.
Thomas Bowdler used to be mentioned pretty often back in my college days, in the Age of Aquarius, when we were letting it all hang out and “keeping it real, baby.” We Baby Boomers, in the toilet flush of our youth, laughed at the weak-minded old English who’d get the vapors from hearing a dirty word or two. Thank Henry Miller we’d evolved past all that!
Well, in the 2020s we Boomers are still more or less running things, but in our dotage we’ve succeeded in sinking beneath Bowdler’s level. It ought to be noted that old Thomas did not hold a copyright on Shakespeare’s works. He never made any attempt to remove the original versions of the plays from the literary market; he simply offered an alternative to people who wanted one. Penguin Random House has changed the official, copyrighted text of Wodehouse for all readers, young and old, wise and foolish. “We have a responsibility to shield the public, you know.”
The Great Pendulum swings in accordance with implacable laws of physics. Swing too far toward license in one generation and you’ll swing back to authoritarianism in the next. It seems we humans live just long enough, generally speaking, to betray our principles.