Richard Chenevix Trench

Richard Chenevix Trench was the Dean of Westminster whose 1857 address helped set in motion the making of a new English dictionary. His decisive contribution was to unite a principle of historical description with a plan for collective labor: record the life of the language rather than prescribe what English speakers ought to say, and enlist many readers to accomplish what no one scholar could do alone.

Identity and setting

Trench was a prominent cleric whose standing gave weight to his role in the Philological Society. The book presents him as embodying the society’s high ambitions, but also places those ambitions within the imperial and religious assumptions of its Victorian setting. Its members regarded English as a language whose spread across the world served both imperial power and the expansion of Christianity. Trench shared the conviction that English had a special global importance; the proposed dictionary’s scholarly purpose therefore arose within a culture that treated the study of English as an undertaking of wider consequence.

His address took place at a fortnightly meeting of the Philological Society in an upstairs room at the London Library on Guy Fawkes’ Day, 1857. At the time, the library occupied a capacious new building, and the society met there among institutions selected for their scholarly aims. The advertised subject, On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries, sounded modest, but its implications were not: in an age that regarded English as an instrument of empire, a new account of the language could matter well beyond the technical work of lexicography.

Trench’s ecclesiastical career later culminated in his appointment as Archbishop of Dublin. He was lame after breaking both knees in a fall from a gangplank while crossing by boat to Ireland, an injury the book explicitly distinguishes from any cause related to piety. These biographical details place the dictionary reformer within a public life shaped by both clerical office and physical misfortune.

A dictionary as a record of language

Trench identified seven principal deficiencies in the dictionaries then available, though the account does not elaborate most of them. Instead, it emphasizes the governing idea behind his criticism: a dictionary should be an inventory of the language, not a tribunal deciding which words were good or bad. Earlier lexicographers, including Samuel Johnson, had in his view overstepped by exercising that kind of authority. The lexicographer’s proper role was historical rather than critical.

That principle changed what a dictionary was meant to contain. Any word with a recognized life in the standard language should be eligible for inclusion, whether ancient or newly emerged, obsolete or still flourishing. Trench treated words as having histories: some endured across generations, some appeared and disappeared quickly, and others had uncertain futures. A work of reference that omitted a word someone needed to look up failed its purpose; comprehensiveness was not an ornamental ambition but a condition of the dictionary’s usefulness.

The method implied by this argument went beyond collecting definitions. Earlier dictionaries had used quotations to illustrate meanings, but Trench’s proposed undertaking would use evidence to show how meanings changed over time. That required reading widely and gathering examples from literature, newspapers, magazines, and journals. The scale of the task made it seem nearly impossible by the standards of the period, which is why Trench’s account of method led directly to a question of organization.

Collective work and democratic ambition

Trench argued that no single person could read all the relevant English writing. The work would require the combined efforts of a very large body of people: potentially hundreds of unpaid amateur readers contributing examples. The suggestion surprised his audience. It was not simply a practical solution to a large workload; it also followed from his view of language. If words belonged to the shared life of English speakers rather than to a dictator’s authority, then assembling their history could be a collective undertaking.

Members leaving the meeting found the proposal possessed a rough democratic appeal. They connected it to freedom in the use of words and to resistance against rigid rules imposed by an unaccountable authority. Their contrast was partly national and polemical: they set the imagined English preference for eccentricity and disorganization against what they characterized as French absolutism in language. The meeting’s response therefore joined an editorial plan to a broader claim about who could shape English and how that authority should be exercised.

Significance

Trench’s importance lies in the way his address joined three elements that the new dictionary would need: a descriptive account of language, a historical method based on evidence, and a distributed workforce capable of gathering that evidence. His proposal did not make the undertaking small or easy; it made its scale answerable to cooperation. The speech’s lasting force in the book comes from this reversal: the immensity that seemed to rule the project out became a reason to enlist readers beyond the ranks of professional scholars.

The democratic language of the proposal coexisted with the society’s imperial confidence in English. Trench’s vision challenged the idea that a single authority should dictate usage, while still directing collective scholarship toward a language the society regarded as properly dominant. That tension gives the address its historical texture: a new openness about who could contribute to a dictionary emerged inside institutions whose account of English’s global reach remained deeply hierarchical.