Malory died leaving his work obviously unrevised, and in this
condition it was brought to Caxton, who prepared it for the press
with his usual enthusiasm in the cause of good literature, and
also, it must be added, with his usual carelessness. New
chapters are sometimes made to begin in the middle of a sentence,
and in addition to simple misprints there are numerous passages
in which it is impossible to believe that we have the text as
Malory intended it to stand. After Caxton's edition Malory's
manuscript must have disappeared, and subsequent editions are
differentiated only by the degree of closeness with which they
follow the first. Editions appeared printed by Wynkyn de Worde
in 1498 and 1529, by William Copland in 1559, by Thomas East
about 1585, and by Thomas Stansby in 1634, each printer
apparently taking the text of his immediate predecessor and
reproducing it with modifications. Stansby's edition served for
reprints in 1816 and 1856 (the latter edited by Thomas Wright);
but in 1817 an edition supervised by Robert Southey went back to
Caxton's text, though to a copy (only two are extant, and only
one perfect!) in which eleven leaves were supplied from Wynkyn de
Worde's reprint. In 1868 Sir Edward Strachey produced for
the present publishers a reprint of Southey's text in modern
spelling, with the substitution of current words for those now
obsolete, and the softening of a handful of passages likely, he
thought, to prevent the book being placed in the hands of boys.
In 1889 a boon was conferred on scholars by the publication of
Dr. H. Oskar Sommer's page-for-page reprint of Caxton's text,
with an elaborate discussion of Malory's sources. Dr. Sommer's
edition was used by Sir E. Strachey to revise his Globe text, and
in 1897 Mr. Israel Gollancz produced for the ``Temple Classics''
a very pretty edition in which Sir Edward Strachey's principles