Just before Queen Victoria was born in the early 19th century, Dr. Thomas Bowdler and his sister Harriet began their career of ³improving² (we¹d say eviscerating) literature. Shakespeare was their first victim. From that start, no English work -- not Chaucer, not the King James Bible, not Robbie Burns -- was safe from the blight of their prudery and zeal. But moral censorship of texts, as Noel Perrin shows in this book, is older than the righteous Bowdler siblings and has endured to our own times. In a new chapter written for this edition, Perrin explores contemporary Bowdlerism, whose victims include dictionaries, Porgy and Bess, Shakespeare (again), The Story of Doctor Dolittle, and Fahrenheit 451. Illustrated.