Author: Bowdler, John
Biography:
BOWDLER, John (1783-1815: ODNB)
Born in London on 4 Feb. 1783, the second son of John Bowdler (1746-1823) and his wife, Harrietta Hanbury (d 1829, age 84), he was educated at a grammar school at Seven Oaks, at Hyde Abbey School, and at Winchester College. Called to the bar in 1807 at Lincoln’s Inn, he practiced briefly as a barrister in the Chancery courts. For the sake of his ailing health, in 1810-12 he traveled in the south of France with his uncle Thomas (1754-1825), the bowdlerizer of Shakespeare. ODNB describes him as “evangelical,” other sources as “High Church.” He did have many friends among the evangelical so-called “Saints”: Henry Thornton, Zachary Macaulay, the brothers Charles and Robert Grant, and others. He had however as many friends among the pre-Tractarian “Hackney Phalanx”, including William Stevens, the founder of a High Church dining society, Nobody’s Friends, of which he, his father, and his uncle Thomas were members. He died of tuberculosis on 1 Feb. 1815 at his residence in Grosvenor Square. He is buried in the church of his baptism, St George the Martyr, Queen Square. Mary (1786-1859), the eldest child of the Rev. Thomas Gisborne, was the primary beneficiary of his estate. In the year following his death, his father published, initially for private circulation, his collected verse and prose, in two volumes, that Cadell and Davies republished three times. Waugh and Innis of Edinburgh republished the theological tracts from that book in a separate volume (1818). The Bowdler family donated proceeds of the first through third editions to the Clergy Orphan Society, those of the fourth edition to the Society for the Suppression of Vice. John Bowdler the elder’s two-volume collection of religious verse by various hands, in English, French, Latin, and Greek, published by Cadell in 1821, includes poems by the younger John Bowdler. In 1857 his younger brother Charles (1784-1879) published The Religion of the Heart as Exemplified in the Life and Writings of John Bowlder. In a wandering, detailed biography, Charles attempted to prove his brother’s evangelical bona fides. (ODNB 20 Mar. 2023; ancestry.com 20 Mar. 2023; PRO PROB 11 / 1565; “Memoir” by J. Bowdler sr. in Select Pieces in Verse and Prose, 2 vols. [1816], vii-xxiii; Viscount Knutsford, Life and Letters of Zachary Macaulay [1900], 265-65, 321-22) JC