Noel Perrin
Dr. Bowdler's Legacy *

In actual fact, however, Gulliver was anything but immune to the change of taste that occurred just after 1800. Howells was certainly right that the book was too good simply to be stood in a corner, like Fanny Hill. In fact, if anything it grew more popular in Victorian times. Gulliver went through about sixty editions from the time it was published in 1726 until 1800 and it went through a hundred and fifty more between 1800 and 1900. But while the eighteenth-century editions were all complete,* something over half the nineteenth-century editions were bowdlerized. So have many been in the twentieth century, including the one introduced by Howells. (This detail does not emerge in his preface.) There are still expurgations in print now.

Two factors combine that made bowdlerism of Gulliver almost inevitable. One is that while Swift may not be ribald in it, in the sense of leering at man's animal nature, he certainly does insist on its presence. If the Victorians tended to put not only their women but all human beings on pedestals, Swift dug pits. Not only does he insist on pointing out that otherwise repulsively hairy male yahoos are bald on their buttocks ("except about the Anus"), while the sagging breasts of the females "often reached almost to the Ground," he will go out of his way to specify that when the Lilliputian army marched, twenty-four abreast, between Gulliver's legs, some of the younger officers were unable to resist looking up to see if they could catch a glimpse of his genitals through his ragged breeches, or inexpressibles. (They could, and were about equally divided between "Laughter and Admiration.") This sort of thing was intolerable.

The other reason is that Gulliver's Travels, like Lamb's Tales, has always been appealing to readers younger than those it was written for. Most of the expurgated editions have been for children - though there have been plenty for adults, too, such as the version put out by Pocket Books in 1939.

Expurgated Gulliver's come, in fact, in about five different forms. Two of these are specifically for children, two are for adolescents, one is for the general reader. For young children the changeless book is normally cut to the first two voyages - Lilliput and Brobignag - thus disposing of the yahoos, and it is drastically abridged, which always causes the junior officers to keep their eyes down. Or else it is retold, in Swift's words where these are bland, in the editor's elsewhere, thus getting rid of all problems at once. Alfred Blaisdell, the publisher, had great success with such a retelling in 1886. Padraic Colum had even greater success with one in 1917, which is still in print. Juvenile writers continue to retell Gulliver now.

For adolescents, there are fancy illustrated editions, such as the one Howells wrote his preface for, and school editions. Both forms appeared about a hundred years ago, and both still exist. But by and large the openly bowdlerized school edition was characteristic of the Victorians, and the covertly bowdlerized picture book is characteristic of the twentieth century.

Both give an interesting picture of what knowledge has been thought too dangerous for teenagers. In the more severely bowdlerized versions, all references to the human torso are gone (hands, feet, head, arms, and legs are all right), and also nearly all reference to activities that involve the torso. Oral activity remains, genital and anal vanish. Gulliver may still swallow a Lilliputian turkey whole, or gag on a quart of Brobdignagian cream. He may not urinate, on palaces or elsewhere, defecate (or even notice the fly-specks of Brobdignagian flies); he may not watch a baby being nursed, or learn that houyhnhnms limit the number of their foals. He may not notice the body-lice on a beggar, or the body odor of a maid of honor; he may not tell a fascinated houyhnhnm about the English medical practice of giving laxatives.

In milder expurgations the same rules apply, but more loosely. There are several editions, for example, in which Gulliver does see a Brobdignagian woman nursing a baby. He is permitted to react. "I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape, and Colour." But these editions then cut the two following sentences, in which it turns out that Gulliver actually does have some ideas for comparison. He no longer says, "It stood prominent six Foot, and could not be less than sixteen in Circumference. The Nipple was about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hew both of that and the Dug so varified with Spots, Pimples, and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous." In short, the idea of a huge breast being disgusting was tolerable to the more liberal editors, but not the reality. Their teenage readers must not learn what the breast actually looked like.

This was obviously not because Swift's description was likely to arouse lust. Neither can it have been simply because pimples, etc., are too disgusting or too shocking for the teenage mind, since the same editions leave other shocking details untouched. This is especially true in the context of death. None of the bowdlerized editions for adolescents, even the strictest, feels it necessary to eliminate the Lilliputian worry about "the Stench of so large a Carcass," if they kill Gulliver. Nor Gulliver's own description of battlefields in Europe, with the dead soldiers "left for Food to Dogs." More striking, none re moves the scene in which a Brobdignagian criminal is beheaded, tied in a chair, and Gulliver watches his blood spout thirty feet in the air, and his severed head bounce on the scaffold floor. (Recent expurgations, such as the Heritage Illustrated Bookshelf edition, New York: 1940, generally do eliminate this passage. Our day is less concerned with innocence, and more with bad dreams.) What was the motive, then? No bowdlerizer of Swift has left a note to explain, but presumably they wanted to preserve the romantic illusions of their readers, even about freckles on breasts. In short, to keep humanity on pedestals.

There is, of course, a considerable case for bowdlerizing Gulliver for children or even adolescents - though there may be an even better case for not giving them the book until they are old enough to read it the way Swift wrote it. What there is not a case for is pretending that Swift wrote it some other way than he did. Scores of editions do pretend that, however, the extreme case perhaps being an unusually severe expurgation published by Rand-McNally in 1912. It omits two hundred passages instead of the usual one hundred - not merely body hair on yahoos and the curiosity of Lilliputian junior officers, but also the information that scandal about ladies' reputations sometimes springs up at courts, that there is a thing in the world called dung, and so on. The anonymous editor has previously contrived to give the impression that Swift himself avoided such matters. "His name echoes through history," the brief preface concludes, "as the clerical exposer of human frailties in a manner to call forth only innocent mirth." First you tell the lie, then you make it true.

Finally, there are a considerable number of expurgations of Gulliver for a general audience. These range from a scholarly expurgation done by the Vice-President of the Royal Irish Academy in I 862 to the slapdash one supervised by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1873 ("Swift's genius commands our admiration, but his works should never be introduced into the home-circle save in such revised and cleanly editions as the present one") to the 1939 Pocket Book. This type has now died out; examples of the other four may still be found throughout the English-speaking world.