English Past and Present

Built from a series of lectures Trench gave first to pupils at King’s College School in London and then, revised, to the Training School at Winchester, this volume follows how English has shifted across the centuries and argues that those shifts repay close attention. He begins by treating English as a composite tongue, drawn together from many sources, then turns to what the language has gained, what it has lost in words and grammatical powers, how the meanings of familiar words have drifted, and how spelling settled into its present forms. Writing as a philologist with a clergyman’s ear for the moral weight carried in ordinary speech, Trench helped popularize the historical study of English. First published in 1855, it stands in the same current of scholarship that soon produced the Oxford English Dictionary.