Popular Culture
- In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 chapter six Emory Bortz says, "I've been pirated, me and Wharfinger, we've been Bowdlerized in reverse or something."
- In the Moral Orel television programme, Moralton's town library is named the Thomas Bowdler Library; most of the library's books are censored (Episode 2, "God's Greatest Gift")
- In the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde, the Jurisfiction police who monitor the textual integrity of all books written and unwritten are constantly battling the Bowdlerisers, who attempt to erase material that they find offensive.
- In Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan's 1884 comic opera Princess Ida, Lady Psyche suggests that students at a women's university who wish to study the classics should get their editions "Bowdlerised". In Patience, Gilbert made an allusion to Bowdler's preface to the expurgated Shakespeare. Bowdler announced his desire to make Shakespeare accessible "without incurring the danger of falling unawares among words and expressions which are of such a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of modesty"; a character in Patience declares, "I believe I am right in saying that there is not one word in that decalet which is calculated to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty."
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