London research library

The London research library was both a public-facing collection and a meeting place for learned societies. On 5 November 1857, a gathering in one of its rooms became the starting point for the dictionary project that, after decades of work, produced the Oxford English Dictionary. The institution’s role was specific but consequential: its location, its decision to rent space to scholarly organizations, and the intellectual company assembled there made it the setting for Richard Chenevix Trench’s argument that English needed a more comprehensive kind of dictionary.

Setting and collection

In 1857 the library occupied a tall, capacious building at the north-west corner of St James’s Square, among grand town houses, private clubs, churches, shops, offices, and foreign embassies. The surrounding quarter was associated with bishops, peers, and Members of Parliament. The library stood within this elite district, but its collection was publicly accessible: admirers regarded it as the finest private collection of books in the world. That combination gave the institution a distinctive position, joining private patronage and scholarly prestige to access beyond the household library.

The library had moved to the building twelve years earlier from cramped quarters on Pall Mall. Its collection was still comparatively small, numbering only a few thousand volumes, and the spacious premises had room to spare. The account contrasts that earlier scale with the more than a million books held there in its own present. The contrast clarifies why the committee considered the building not only a home for books but also a resource whose rooms could be put to further use. The institution’s physical capacity helped shape the circumstances in which the dictionary initiative began.

Rented rooms and scholarly societies

To raise additional money, the committee decided to rent rooms, with a restriction on the kind of organizations it would admit. The tenants were to be societies whose members were likely to share the library’s scholarly aims and to mingle comfortably with its own membership, described as aristocratic and often snobbish. The arrangement was therefore practical and selective at once: spare space could generate income, while the choice of tenants preserved the intellectual and social character the committee valued.

Two groups were chosen, the Statistical Society and the Philological Society. The library did not itself devise the dictionary project, but its rental policy gave the Philological Society a place to meet within a building devoted to books and learning. That institutional connection matters because the eventual undertaking began not in a press or university office, but at a society meeting in an upstairs room of the library. Its rooms accommodated discussion; the meeting turned that setting into the point of departure for a much larger enterprise.

The meeting that launched a dictionary

The Philological Society met fortnightly. On a cold Thursday evening, 5 November 1857, shortly after six, Richard Chenevix Trench addressed the society in an upstairs room. His announced subject was deficiencies in English dictionaries. The speech became the immediate starting point for the project referred to as the Big Dictionary, and the account identifies the London research library as the place where its making began. A meeting room rented under the committee’s scholarly criteria thus entered the history of English lexicography through a particular argument about what a dictionary should do.

Trench spoke in a period when English was widely treated by the society’s members as an imperial language, and when its spread was connected to the expansion of Christianity. His subject consequently carried more weight than a technical review of existing reference books: dictionaries were understood as instruments concerned with a language whose reach was itself politically and religiously charged. The library’s setting among the institutions and residences of powerful London society gives the occasion a clear historical context, though the speech’s importance rested on its proposals rather than on the room alone.

From the room to the Dictionary

Trench’s central principle was that a dictionary should inventory the language rather than dictate which words deserved inclusion. In his view, the lexicographer was to act as a historian, recording words with recognized life in the standard language, not as a critic selecting only words judged good or proper. This challenged the prescriptive habits of earlier dictionary-makers, including Samuel Johnson. The library meeting is significant because it gave public form to an alternative conception of lexicography: a record of usage across time, rather than an authority that attempted to settle usage by decree.

The project that followed was extraordinarily prolonged. The account contrasts the six years taken by Samuel Johnson and his team with the roughly seventy years required to complete the later dictionary. That outcome was not the work of the library committee, nor does the evidence assign the library a continuing role in editing or printing. Its place in the story is more precise: the building provided the room in which Trench’s intervention was delivered to the Philological Society, and that speech set the larger undertaking in motion. The library’s contribution was therefore architectural and institutional, but the consequences of the meeting reached far beyond its rooms.