" Knows Where!"

DR. BOWDLER'S LEGACY: A HISTORY OF EXPURGATED BOOKS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA by Noel Perrin. 296 pages. Atheneum. $7.95.

"Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene, and thank God, we are sufficiently advanced to have found it out!" Thus spake the pure--the ever so pure--voice of the born bowdlerizer. Self-congratulatory, combining limitless prudery with limitless zeal, the expurgator haunted the live authors of the 19th century, and the dead authors of every century previous. Without respect for reputation, he labored--blue stockings on his feet, blue pencil in his hand--to save the reading public from corruption and to save masterpieces (including the Bible) from themselves.

What could prompt an educated man to change Lady Macbeth's most famous line to "Out, crimson spot"? Or to excise mention of Queequeg's underwear from Moby Dick? In framing answers, Noel Perrin, professor of English at Dartmouth, takes as his point of departure Dr. Thomas Bowdler, who had a passion for chess and prison reform and an aversion to London smog, sick people, and all writing that, as he put it, "can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty." Certainly the Family Shakespeare (first edition 1807, second edition 1818) became the most popular expurgation in literary history. It gave Bowdler's name immortality as part of the language. But Perrin is up against not one man but a state of mind, and he has had the wit and learning to expand - his study into a brilliant little work of cultural history.

Licensed Hands. Delicacy, Perrin suggests, became an overrated virtue in the 19th century. No response rated higher than "being easily shocked." One proved one's sensitivity by one's blushes, as Dr. Bowdler indicated, and, if necessary, by fainting. It was clearly feminine behavior, and Perrin dares to hint that behind every successful bowdlerizer there is a woman. Perrin's real scoop, however, is the suggestion that the real Bowdler probably was not Thomas at all, nor his wife, but his sister Henrietta Maria, known as Harriet.*

What Perrin's survey makes alarmingly evident is that bowdlerizing could become almost as unbridled a lust as lust itself. An expurgator may begin quietly enough by "lopping" or "cutting." He might omit, say, Sodom and Gomorrah from Old Testament stories. But before he is through, he is likely to end up as a compulsive cleaner--"the sort of man who is capable of bringing out an expurgated edition of Wordsworth," as a Victorian clergyman with a penchant for editing was once described.

In fact, Chaucer ranks second to Shakespeare among the victims of bowdlerizing. The company is distinguished: Dryden, Pope, St. Augustine, Benjamin Franklin ("the leading native victim" of American bowdlerism), and, of course, Donne. "An easy test of what kind of college a student goes to," Perrin proposes, "is to quote the single line 'License my roving hands and let them go,' and see if his eyes light up."

Matching the big-name victims are some big-name bowdlerizers. Lewis Carroll planned some tidy mutilations in his unfinished The Girl's Own Shakespeare, intended for his favorite age group (10-17). No bowdlerizer has ever confessed to any problems for himself. Almost all have declared it their duty to save their inferiors from temptation --meaning, of course, the young and the lower classes.

As the passion for expurgation galloped, even the synonyms for bowdlerizing got bowdlerized. "Castrate" and "geld," commonly used to describe their trade by early expurgators, gave way to "purge," "prune," and "chasten." Finally reaction had to set in. The purity market really went out of big business, Perrin figures, with World War I.

Yet he assumes that the source emotion of bowdlerism is still very much with us: "Delicacy has never died," he says, "and never will.'"Meanwhile, the practice still goes on, now catering to different sensibilities. The 1885 bowdlerizer of Huckleberry Finn who changed "in a sweat" to "in such a hurry" has been replaced by an enlightened 1960s model who transforms "a nigger woman" into "one of the servants."

The new standard of delicacy is more admirable. But the implicit point of Perrin's book is to make the whole process of text-tampering appear a loser's game. If so, the classic, frightening example to all future bowdlerizers would have to be the editing of Matthew Prior* who approached the line, "You've thrust your finger God knows where!" blushed, and serenely revised it to read: "You've thrust your finger -- -- knows where!"

* A literary spinster of Bath, Harriet anonymously created the first edition. When Thomas brought out the second edition, he got credit for both. * Prior is often quoted as the author of the quite unbowdlerizable epigram: No, no; for my Virginity,

When I lose that, says Rose, I'll die:

Behind the Elms, last Night, cry'd Dick,

Rose, were you not extreamly Sick?

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