St James's Square

St James's Square was both an elite London address and the setting for a meeting that helped set the making of the Oxford English Dictionary in motion. On 5 November 1857, in a room used by the Philological Society within the London Library, Richard Chenevix Trench spoke about deficiencies in English dictionaries; the book's account identifies that address as the beginning of the Big Dictionary's history.

Setting and Institutions

The meeting took place at the north-west corner of St James's Square, in a narrow terraced building amid grand town houses and private clubs. Bishops, peers, and Members of Parliament lived nearby; fashionable shops, churches, office apartments, and foreign embassies were within a short distance. The square thus locates the episode in a neighbourhood associated with political, religious, and social influence.

The corner building housed the London Library, which had moved there twelve years earlier from cramped premises on Pall Mall. In 1857 it held only a few thousand books and had room to spare. Its committee rented rooms to raise money, choosing societies whose scholarly aims seemed compatible with the library and whose members could mingle with its aristocratic membership. The Statistical Society and the Philological Society were selected.

The 1857 Meeting

Shortly after six on the wintry evening of 5 November, Guy Fawkes' Day, the Philological Society held one of its fortnightly meetings in an upstairs room. Trench, then Dean of Westminster, addressed the society on the deficiencies of English dictionaries. The address was delivered in a setting where the library's books and the society's scholarly purpose made the improvement of English reference works an immediate concern rather than an abstract ambition.

From Address to Dictionary Project

The square's importance in the book is not simply that it provides an aristocratic London backdrop: it is the specific place attached to the project's point of departure. The account says that the making of the Big Dictionary began with Trench's speech at the London Library on Guy Fawkes' Day in 1857. What began in an upstairs meeting room would become a project lasting about seventy years, a scale that contrasts sharply with the ordinary cadence of the society's fortnightly gatherings.