The Family Mark Twain

Alan Gribben's new Huckleberry Finn sans n-word is reminiscent of Thomas Bowdler's more "acceptable" – and much less powerful – edition of The Family Shakespeare.

With Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben set to publish a new, “sanitized” edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn next month, it’s clear that the legacy of Thomas Bowdler, who died nearly two centuries ago, lives on.

In 1818, Bowdler published The Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. Back then, quality family time often involved a lot of elocution: parents would read aloud from the Bible and the Bard, and children would memorize and recite improving verses.

Bowdler noticed that parents were leaving out the naughty bits of Shakespeare and decided to make the texts more “acceptable,” for example by changing “Out, damned spot” to “Out, crimson spot.” This example demonstrates, in just a few words, the ultimate misguidedness of Bowdler’s well-intentioned exercise: the three staccato words delivered in a moment of high drama by the crazed Lady Macbeth are replaced with a lame phrase that conveys nothing of the power of the original.

Some might consider Bowdler’s endeavour one of the earlier examples of political correctness, but there were really no politics involved (except in that, though Bowdler was named the official editor of The Family Shakespeare, it was in fact his sister Harriet who edited the book; at the time, women were not supposed to know what the more scandalous passages meant). In high school, we were given Bowdlerized texts as well – including Shakespeare. Our ears, as supposedly tender as those of our forebears (at least in class), could not be exposed to the word “damned” either, much less the Porter’s scene in Macbeth. The school authorities meant well, and so did Bowdler. In the former case, there were complaining parents to worry about and hence a choice between exposing the students to some Shakespeare or to none; in the latter, Bowdler’s emendations also made Shakespeare more accessible to children.

According to the Vancouver Sun, in the upcoming new edition of Huckleberry Finn, the word “injun” will be eliminated, and the n-word – which appears 219 times in the original work – will be replaced with the word “slave.” “This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colour-blind,” Gribben told Publishers Weekly. “Race matters in these books. It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”

In this case, unlike that of Bowdler, politics is most definitely involved. It always is when themes of gender or race crop up. Take Lawrence Hill’s well-received The Book of Negroes, the title of which refers to an actual historical record. In certain countries with highly racialized societies – the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia – the book was re-titled Someone Knows My Name. Such squeamishness on the part of those in the publishing industry is a clear sign that we’re talking about more than polite sensibilities. But should the issue be reduced to “political correctness“? I’m not so sure.