Victorian linguistic imperialism

Victorian linguistic imperialism treated the worldwide expansion of English not merely as a consequence of British power but as evidence of a providential mission. Among the Philological Society’s members, linguistic scholarship could therefore serve two purposes at once: it investigated language as an academic subject while helping define and extend the reach of the language they regarded as dominant. The drive to document English comprehensively arose within that imperial confidence, but Richard Chenevix Trench’s account of a dictionary as a record rather than a tribunal also exposed a tension between recording a language and trying to govern it.

Religious and imperial rationale

Richard Chenevix Trench embodied the Philological Society’s expansive ambitions. He and many of its roughly two hundred members believed that the apparent spread of English around the world had a divine purpose. In the worldview described by the book, English expansion and the spread of Christianity reinforced one another: the wider the language travelled, the more people would be brought within a Christian moral order. For a Protestant cleric, there was also a denominational implication. English might eventually outweigh the influence of languages associated with the Roman Church, while its reach could help make reconciliation between the churches imaginable.

This religious rationale did not make the Society’s aims politically neutral. Its formal work was academic, and its discussions could concern specialized subjects such as sound changes in Papuan and Negrito dialects or the role of a sound in High German. Yet the book distinguishes that scholarly activity from the Society’s larger informal purpose: improving knowledge of English as the language its members considered properly dominant. Learning about languages and asserting English pre-eminence were not presented as opposites. The former lent scholarly authority to the latter.

English in a changing world

The case for a comprehensive dictionary gathered force as British influence expanded overseas. Voyages by sailors such as Drake, Ralegh, and Frobisher, the establishment of colonies in the Americas and India, and the projection of British power carried English and English concepts well beyond England. The language was becoming important to international commerce, military affairs, and law, while displacing French, Spanish, Italian, and other courtly languages. In this setting, making English easier to know and learn was more than a literary undertaking: it answered the need to inventory what people spoke, wrote, and read across a widening sphere of influence.

The project also answered a sense of national delay. The Italians, French, and Germans had already founded institutions concerned with their linguistic heritage. The Accademia della Crusca, established in Florence in 1582, produced an Italian dictionary in 1612; in Paris, the Académie Française was founded in 1634. Britain, by contrast, had taken no comparable institutional approach. By the end of the seventeenth century, the English were described as uncomfortably conscious of their backwardness in studying their own tongue. During the eighteenth century, proposals to improve English and raise its standing at home and abroad filled the air. The eventual dictionary project thus belonged both to an international competition over linguistic authority and to a domestic effort to remedy perceived neglect.

A dictionary for imperial English

The London research library speech that set the larger undertaking in motion took place on Guy Fawkes' Day in 1857. Its advertised subject, the deficiencies of English dictionaries, carried a larger implication in an age when English was regarded as an imperial language and books about it as tools of imperial maintenance. Trench identified seven principal shortcomings in existing dictionaries, but his central claim was broader than any technical correction: a dictionary should be an inventory of the language, not a guide that divided acceptable words from unacceptable ones.

That distinction mattered to the imperial project. An inventory could help make English more fully knowable and teachable, supplying a record suited to a language used across commerce, arms, law, and expanding colonial networks. But the inventory Trench advocated was not to be curated according to a lexicographer’s personal judgment of which words were good. Earlier dictionary-makers, including Samuel Johnson, had made such selections. Trench instead cast the lexicographer as a historian rather than a critic and rejected the authority of a single ruler—or even a governing body—to decree which words belonged. The proper record would include words with a recognized life in the standard language.

Inclusion and the limits of the ideal

The call for an inventory also challenged the narrowness of earlier word lists. A satisfactory dictionary, in the account surrounding Trench’s intervention, needed to encompass ordinary and popular words as well as learned and obscure vocabulary. A small grammatical word was not to count for less than an elaborate, many-syllabled one. Such breadth made the dictionary more useful as a record of English in its range, rather than merely a storehouse of difficult terms for educated readers.

Yet the ideal of comprehensive description existed inside an unequal linguistic order. English was not simply being documented: it was gaining ground over other European languages and travelling with British power. The book places the Society’s scholarly ambitions beside its conviction that English was the world’s properly dominant language, and the lecture’s defence of linguistic record beside the belief that English dictionaries helped sustain empire. Trench’s resistance to prescriptive authority qualified how the language should be recorded; it did not undo the imperial assumptions that made English’s global expansion seem desirable. The concept therefore contains a productive tension: the dictionary was imagined as open to the life of words, while the political and religious framework surrounding its creation treated the ascendancy of English as a form of progress.