Edward Healy Thompson, a convert to the Church, editor of the Library of Religious Biography and translator of many lives of the saints, who died in 1891, published The Life and Glories of St. Joseph with Burns & Oates in 1888. It is, as he says in his Preface, a composite work, drawn chiefly from the dissertation of Canon Antonio Vitali of Rome, together with Father José Moreno and other writers, and it gathers into one book what Scripture, Tradition and the saints have said of the Spouse of Mary and Foster-Father of Jesus.
This edition is a light restoration of Thompson’s own English, not a new version of it. The text was first transcribed from the 1888 first edition and checked page by page against the original; it was then modernized only so far as a present-day reader needs: American spelling, Scripture references in the modern form, the prayers addressed as “you,” and the occasional word whose meaning has shifted since his day. His sentences, his vocabulary and his voice are his own. The printer’s errors of 1888 have been corrected, and names are given in their standard spelling; Thompson’s occasional slips of date and attribution, which are those of the scholarship of his time, are kept as he wrote them. Scripture is quoted in the Douay-Rheims version, as he quoted it.