The printed edition this web book is based on
This web book reproduces a specific printed English translation of Thomas à Kempis's De Imitatione Christi:
- Title: The Imitation of Christ: Four Books
- Author: Thomas à Kempis (traditionally attributed)
- Translated by: William Benham (1831–1910), Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, sometime Rector of St. Edmund's, Lombard Street, and Canon of Canterbury
- Digitised from: a University of California Library copy, scanned by the Internet Archive (identifier
imitationofchris00benhrich)
Public domain status
Both the underlying work and this translation are in the public domain. Thomas à Kempis died in 1471; his Latin text has been free of copyright for centuries. William Benham's English translation was first published in the nineteenth century, and Benham himself died in 1910 — well over a century ago. UECF.NET is therefore free to publish the complete text of this translation, and does so in full, without abridgement.
How this web edition was produced
UECF.NET was supplied with a scanned PDF of the printed edition described above (450 pages, digitized by the Internet Archive). The page images carry a machine-readable text layer produced by optical character recognition (OCR) at the time of scanning. Our team extracted that text, matched it against the book's own printed table of contents to identify all four Books and all 114 chapters in order, removed running headers, page numbers and layout artefacts, restored numbered paragraphs and words split across line breaks, and separated the marginal Scripture citations into a references list at the foot of each chapter.
The scanned original's decorative opening capital letter is occasionally misread by OCR at the very start of a chapter's first paragraph; a small number of chapters may show a minor artefact there. The book's own antique cloth cover — photographed by the Internet Archive as part of the scan — is used as this edition's cover image, with two library accession stickers digitally removed. Every other word of the 114 chapters and the translator's preface is Benham's own published translation, unabridged.
Scripture references
Where Kempis's text quotes or alludes to a Bible verse, the printed edition sets the reference in the margin (for example, John xiv. 23). Those references are preserved and listed under each chapter as "Scripture references in this chapter" rather than reset inline, since OCR cannot reliably recover their exact original position on the page.
Corrections
If you notice a typographical error, a misplaced chapter heading, or an OCR mistake, please let us know at info@uecf.net, quoting the Book, chapter and, if possible, the sentence in question.