In 1807, on the ninth of September, Richard Chenevix Trench was born in Dublin, into what would prove a life spanning poetry, lexicography, theology, and the church.

Trench was educated at Harrow School before going on to Trinity College. He went on to work across several fields simultaneously, serving as an Anglican priest and eventually rising to the rank of archbishop, while also producing writing in English that drew on his work as a hispanist. His career brought together the sacred and the scholarly in ways that were unusual for a single figure: he held clerical office while contributing seriously to the study of language as a lexicographer, and he wrote poetry throughout his life as well.

As a lexicographer, Trench made a contribution that had lasting practical consequences. He was a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and his work was conducted within that intellectual and institutional world. His roles as Anglican priest and archbishop placed him within the established church, while his parallel identity as a writer and hispanist pointed toward a broader set of intellectual commitments. The combination of ecclesiastical responsibility and serious literary and linguistic engagement defined the shape of his public life.

Trench died in 1886 at Eaton Square, with the date recorded variously as the 27th or 28th of March. He had been born in Dublin nearly seventy-nine years earlier and had spent his life moving between the pulpit, the study of language, and the writing of verse. The range of roles he held — poet, lexicographer, writer, archbishop, Anglican priest, hispanist — gives a sense of the breadth of his activity, and the fact that he wrote in English throughout connects all of those pursuits to a single sustained body of work produced over the course of a long career.