Chapter 4, Gathering Earth's Daughters Summary and Analysis

On Guy Fawkes Day, 1857, Dr. Minor arrived in London and moved into his house in St. James Square, one of the nicest parts of London. In the London Library, Richard Chenevix Trench spoke to the Philological Society. He said God approved of the spread of English as an essential imperial device and for the worldwide growth of Christianity. The idea of the society was to improve upon the understanding of the properly dominant language of the world. Trench also argued that the major dictionaries in existence had major defects.

Four hundred earlier, there was no English dictionary. This made writing a different phenomenon and more inconvenient. There were Latin dictionaries from 1225 on, however. Some Latin-English dictionaries began to appear in the 16th century. In the 17th century, demand for dictionaries increased, particularly for difficult words...