You Can't Read This

by Val Ross

  In 1807, two new books appeared in print; perhaps they even turned up on the shelves at Newbery’s shop. The books were Tales from Shakespear and The Family Shakspeare (people then spelled the playwright’s name many different ways). Both these books rewrote William Shakespeare’s plays to make them more “suitable” for impressionable readers. Yet both these books had dark secrets of their own.

  In the first case, it’s easy to see why there was secrecy. The title page of the first edition of Tales from Shakespear: Designed for the Use of Young Persons falsely declares the author to be the well-known poet and essayist Charles Lamb, and the publisher to be one Thomas Hodgkins. In fact, the publisher was really William Godwin – and his name cast fear in the hearts of English citizens everywhere. Old, bearded Mr. Godwin was a famous political radical, a socialist. His late wife had been none other than the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, and their daughter, Mary, would grow up to write the novel Frankenstein.

  As for the author of this book – it was true that Charles Lamb had written six of the chapters, but most of the stories, fourteen to be precise, had been written by Charles’s sister, Mary Lamb. Her name could not be mentioned because, in a fit of insanity, she had committed murder.

  Some of England’s best poets and writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, knew Mary Lamb as a dear friend. However, they also knew that she was subject to fits. One afternoon in September 1796, she had picked up a carving knife that was about to be used on the family’s roast mutton dinner, and plunged it into her mother. Charles had grabbed his sister from behind, forcing her to drop the knife. Then she had been taken away.

  At that time the King of England, George III, was subject to spells of insanity. Because the English people were learning to tolerate this in their king, they were becoming more understanding of mental illness generally. So Mary Lamb was not executed for her crime, but merely sent to a madhouse. After a year she seemed sane again and moved back home with her brother, who promised to take care of her. Her fits came back every other year or so. Whenever Mary felt another spell of madness coming on, she and Charles could be seen walking across London, back to the madhouse, crying as they carried Mary’s straitjacket between them. Whenever Mary got better, she came home and started back to work, writing with Charles.

  With a murderess author and a publisher who was a notorious radical with feminist connections, it’s easy to see why Tales from Shakespear was presented with less than the whole truth. But what about the other book? What dark mystery kept the real author of The Family Shakspeare a secret? What could possibly be as bad as revolutionary politics, feminism, or murder?

  At the front of The Family Shakspeare’s first edition, an anonymous preface explained that the author was trying to serve “those who value every literary production in proportion to the effect it may produce in a religious or moral point of view….” The author had “omitted many speeches in which SHAKSPEARE has been tempted to purchase laughter at the price of decency.” With all the cheap laughs censored, said the writer, the plays could safely be read by “young persons of both sexes.”

  Over the next few years, it leaked out that the book was the work of Thomas Bowdler, a retired doctor of strong religious beliefs. After The Family Shakspeare appeared, Dr. Bowdler’s name eventually became so well known that it turned into a verb. “To bowdlerize” means to prudishly mutilate a text, to delete all the bits you disapprove of.

  Despite all the effort he spent chopping up Shakespeare’s work, Thomas Bowdler admired the playwright. Bowdler declared that, thanks to his “improvements,” Shakespeare’s genius “would undoubtedly shine with more unclouded lustre.”

  But maybe Thomas Bowdler shouldn’t get all the credit. We now think there was another bowdlerizer behind the scenes.

  Thomas, his brother John, and two sisters, Jane and Harriet, were the children of a truly talented prude, Squire Bowdler, who liked to read aloud to his family, making up corrections to Shakespeare and other great English authors as he went along. Thomas recalled those evenings with great fondness, and said his father did such a flawless patch-job that no one suspected a thing. Coming from such an ultra-respectable household, the Bowdler children were very sensitive to anything that offended modesty. When John grew up, he used to advise women to watch what they said about babies and bodies. “Few women have any idea how much men are disgusted by the slightest approach to these [topics] in any female,” he warned.

  Then there was Thomas, who hung around literary London and boasted in his letters that, as a young man attending a public reading, he had once sat near Samuel Johnson, the author of the great dictionary. Thomas trained to be a doctor but, as with all the Bowdlers, anything to do with bodies – sick people, for example – made him squeamish, and he quit medicine. At age fifty-two, he got married. Maybe his wife’s body repelled him too, for the couple soon separated.

  The younger Bowdler sister, Harriet, was so proper that when she went to the opera (according to a letter written by an acquaintance) “she kept her eyes shut the whole time, and when I asked her why, she said it [the dancing on stage] was so indelicate, she could not bear to look.”

  Whoever had written it, The Family Shakspeare of 1807 had gotten rid of the entire tragedy of Romeo and Juliet; no more wickedness about teenagers who fall in love and marry against their parents’ wishes. You could not read Othello, the great tragedy about a black military hero who murders his white wife after he is falsely convinced that she has been unfaithful – how disgraceful! In Hamlet, the hero’s sexy flirtation with Ophelia was trimmed. Macbeth lost the scene in which a drunken porter imagines being a porter in hell And “damned Glendower” in the play Henry IV became “vile Glendower.”

  A second edition of the bowdlerized Shakespeare was published in 1818. This time Thomas Bowdler’s name was on the title page. This time the cleanup job was more thorough. Othello was allowed back, but only with strong misgivings; as Dr. Bowdler warned in a letter to The British Critic magazine, “The subject is unfortunately little suited to family reading.” Shakespearean characters of loose morals, like Doll Tearsheet, had disappeared (her way of speaking, Dr. B. explained to The British Critic, “is in the highest degree disgusting”). In the original version of Henry IV, Prince Hal laughs at his drunken friend Falstaff: “Thou art so fat witted, what with drinking of sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper.” That’s cut down in the Bowdler version; it was thought indecent for poor old Falstaff to loosen his tight clothes after a big meal.

  The 1818 edition of The Family Shakespeare (with a modern spelling for Shakespeare’s name this time) was noted by two influential magazines, which started a public battle over whether its censorship was a good thing or not. Blackwood’s Magazine called the Bowdler book “prudery in paste-board,” and fought publicly with the Edinburgh Review (which described the book as “this very meritorious publication”). All the publicity convinced ordinary book-buyers to check out the new Shakespeare for themselves.

  And so the next edition, printed in extra-large type so families could read it easily by candlelight, became a bestseller. For the next century and more, The Family Shakespeare sold steadily and inspired many imitators. By 1900 there were almost fifty different versions of sanitized Shakespeare on sale, but the Bowdler version remained at the head of the pack, and stayed in print until the middle of the 1900s. Generations went through school not realizing that they were reading the classics filtered through 1820s notions of respectability.

  Or that those notions were, at least at first, the notions of Harriet Bowdler. We now suspect strongly that it was Harriet – she who could not look at dancing – who first cleaned up the Shakespearean sewer. A letter written in 1811 by a friend of the family, the Reverend Robert Mayow, refers to “Mrs, Bowdler’s Shakespeare,” There is also an 1821 letter from a bishop who seems to have been in on the secret. He notes that “Mrs, Bowdler and her Brother have done a great deal towards moralizing Shakespeare,” And after Harriet
died in 1830, her nephew Thomas wrote a letter revealing that “The Shakespeare is my aunt’s edition, …”

  But the lady herself never admitted to anything. She wrote another anonymous book, Sermons on the Doctrines and Duties of Christianity, which was also a bestseller (it went through fifty-two printings over fifty years). In it she insisted, “I do not write for fame but in the humble hope of being useful to a very respectable class of my fellow Christians.” But that was not the real reason she would not put her name on The Family Shakspeare. The truth was simple: Harriet did not want it known that a woman of her refined sensitivity had actually read Shakespeare’s original words. And she certainly didn’t want people to realize that she understood what she read – lewd puns, dirty jokes, and all.

  A Book at His Fingertips

  READING IS A complicated process of seeing and recognizing symbols, and translating them into sounds and words. Problems with the eyes or the brain can make that process seem impossible. But it’s amazing how some people refuse to allow anything, even blindness, to stop them from reading.

  ouis Braille, born in 1809 in the village of Coupvray, France, was just three years old that day when he toddled into the workshop of his father, a saddle-maker. No one was there. He saw his father’s tools – the knives and awls kept razor-edged to cut the saddle leather – gleaming by the big wooden workbench. The little boy decided to use these wonderful instruments the way his father did, slashing and slicing to make grown-up things. He reached for the shiniest, sharpest tool, grabbed a piece of leather, and poked it. He wasn’t sure if the tool had pierced the leather, so he held the leather up to look, and poked again.

  His mother heard terrible screaming. Running to the workshop, she found that her child had stabbed himself in the eye. Frantically she bandaged him and applied herbal remedies, but Louis’s eye grew infected. He probably rubbed it, because the infection spread to his other eye. The little boy went blind.

  This bust of Louis Braille stands in the Bibliotheque Nationale (National Library) in Paris. Although his reading and writing system is almost two hundred years old, and simple enough for children to start learning by the age of five, the world still does not have enough Braille teachers and materials.

  Many blind people lived terrible lives in those days, begging on street corners for a few coins. People made fun of the blind as they turned round and round, unable to see who was tormenting them. Louisa parents were determined to spare their bright little boy such a lonely, empty life. They convinced a teacher to let Louis attend the local school, and the boy memorized his lessons so well that he often stood at the head of the class. His father cut letter shapes out of leather for him, and his older sister Catherine fashioned letters from pieces of straw. But since Louis could not read, it was clear that, as the lessons became more complicated, sooner or later he would have to drop out of school.

  The teacher suggested that the family take the boy to a special school for the blind in Paris. A local nobleman, the Marquis d’Orvilliers, offered to pay the costs. And so Louis, not yet eleven, boarded a stagecoach with his father in February 1819, for Paris. Their journey ended at the front doors of the Royal Institution for Blind Children, on Rue St. Victor.

  It was a legendary building, the former home of Saint Vincent de Paul, the great French religious figure who helped the poor and the sick, and most of the building was at least two hundred years old. During the French Revolution it had served as a prison for priests, and some priests had been put to death in the courtyard. To a sensitive child, the building probably felt haunted. Louis could hear the school’s halls echo with the distant sound of coughing. But it was one of the world’s most advanced schools for the blind, and while he was there Louis would change the world.

  After the pleasant, grassy smells of the French countryside, the school must have appalled Louis with its stench. Its walls were frigid and damp to the touch. The fifteen stoves that burned through the winters could not keep the students from catching colds and worse. An 1821 government report on the place admitted, “The house is situated in a low-lying district which is airless, evil-smelling and conducive to the spread of disease.” At that time no one knew about germs, and how they made people sick.

  But the good part was this: There were almost sixty other blind children to talk with, and specially trained teachers to help them memorize lessons in arithmetic, geography, history, and literature. Best of all, there were books – huge books with the print pressed into thick paper so that the letters stood out on the other side, and blind students could pass their hands over the raised surfaces and read the letters by feeling them.

  Louis soon realized that these books weren’t very good. Of the fourteen books printed with these raised letters, most were grammars; not one was a storybook. Students had to feel each letter and remember it, and go on to the next and remember it, until they had the whole word – and do that for each word in the sentence. Also, the letters had to be so big that the books were very awkward to handle. Like his fellow students, Louis found reading difficult and slow. Music lessons were much easier. His fingers learned to fly across the keys of the organ and piano, and up and down the neck of the cello.

  One day when Louis was in his early teens, the whole school was summoned for a special assembly. The children heard the director announce a special visitor: Captain Nicholas-Marie-Charles Barbier de la Serre, a French army artillery captain from an aristocratic family. The captain had just returned from America with an idea that might help the children.

  While on the battlefield, the captain told them, he had developed a unique system of writing so that soldiers could send messages at night, when it was too dark to read. Captain Barbier’s system let the soldiers feel paper coded in combinations of raised dots and dashes that represented syllables or chunks of sound.

  As the students murmured with interest, the director explained that the school would be trying out Captain Barbier’s system, both for reading and – using a little machine that pressed dots into paper – for writing as well.

  Louis was one of the first to learn the system. It worked far better than those heavy books with the pressed-in letters. But it wasn’t perfect, not for the needs of blind students. Some syllables were coded in as many as twelve dots – a lot for a reader to feel. Because the captain’s dots and dashes only represented syllables, they didn’t show spelling, accents (which are crucial in French), or punctuation. This was hardly surprising, since the system had been designed for battlefield dispatches.

  Louis asked to meet with the captain, and suggested improvements. With his aristocratic background, Captain Barbier may have thought the saddler’s boy was being uppity, daring to correct him. In any case, the soldier couldn’t see why blind people would want to read anything more complicated than a battlefront bulletin. He refused to even think about making further refinements.

  So Louis went off to design his own system. After class, working late into the night – he didn’t need light anyway – he experimented with a pointed stylus, poking dots into paper. He decided the dots should represent letters instead of syllables. And instead of Captain Barbier’s complicated system of twelve dots, he shrank his clusters to blocks of six dots or fewer. This meant that each letter could be felt all at once, with one touch of the fingertip, just as sighted people see a whole letter at a glance.

  Louis Braille worked for three years on his invention. Finally, he presented the school director with the system he had invented. For blind people all over the world, yearning to read books for information, for education, and for sheer pleasure, Louis’s system would open the doors to a vast and wonderful library.

  Within another three years, Louis Braille had published a Braille grammar book. Then came a book titled Method of Publishing Words, Music and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them. Pretty good for a youth not yet twenty.

  However, the cold, old, smelly school where Louis was by now working as a teacher was starting to kill him
. The foul air infected his lungs. Before he was thirty years old he was coughing up blood, a sign of the deadly disease tuberculosis.

  Louis Braille died on January 6, 1852, just after his forty-third birthday, and was buried in Coupvray, A hundred years later, his body was moved to the Pantheon, a huge, temple-like building on the Left Bank in Paris, where he lies with other heroes of France, A bronze bust of him, commissioned by the villagers of Coupvray, stands in the village where he was born. It shows a gentle, handsome man with his head tilted slightly downwards, as if he is concentrating on hearing some quiet message. His hands, which he turned into tools of reading, remain to this day in a small urn in the town cemetery.

  The rest of the world didn’t adopt Louis Braille’s system right away. For years, many schools refused to ask blind people what system they preferred. Educators refused to accept the idea that reading with your fingertips might (as we now know) involve a slightly different part of the brain than reading by sight.

  Braille was only accepted in England after authorities let blind students vote on which system to use. It wasn’t until 1878, at an international congress to adopt a printing method for sight-impaired people, that Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland agreed that Braille would be their standard. The United States took another forty years to sign on.

  Even now, people are still fighting over different forms of Braille. Symbols for dollar signs and e-mail addresses vary from country to country. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a blind scientist who learned Braille math in Canada or the United States could not read a British math text, and a blind British mathematician could not read math texts in Braille from Germany. “It’s still a real Tower of Babel,” says Darleen Bogart, a past president of the International Council of English Braille.