The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus

306 Pages·2009·1.52 MB·English

by  Joshua Kendall

The
Man
Who
Made
Lists
Love, Death, Madness,
and the Creation of
Roget’s Thesaurus
J O S H U A K E N D A L L
G. P. P UTNAM’S SONS New York

The
Man
Who
Made
Lists

The
Man
Who
Made
Lists
Love, Death, Madness,
and the Creation of
Roget’s Thesaurus
J O S H U A K E N D A L L
G. P. P UTNAM’S SONS New York
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin
Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of
Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria
3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd,
11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ),
67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson
New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2008 by Joshua Kendall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any
printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy
of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Page 289 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kendall, Joshua C., date.
The man who made lists : love, death, madness, and the creation of Roget’s Thesaurus /
Joshua Kendall.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4295-9715-1
1. Roget, Peter Mark, 1779–1869. 2. Lexicographers—Great Britain—Biography.
3. Philologists—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Physicians—Great Britain—Biography.
5. Roget, Peter Mark, 1779–1869. Thesaurus of English words and phrases. 6. English
language—Synonyms and antonyms—Lexicography. 7. Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.
CT788.R534K46 2008 2007029264
413.092—dc22
[B]
Book design by Chris Welch
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet
addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility
for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any con-
trol over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Contents
Preface
1
Prologue: Stained by the Blood of a National Hero 9
Part One Formations (1779–1808)
1. The Boy Without a Home 21
2. The Brilliant Student 53
3. The Idle and Depressed Young Man 83
4. Napoleon’s Captive 111
5. Manchester: Both the Thesaurus and a Medical Career Begun 145
Part Two Bloomsbury Doctor, Inventor,
and Scientist (1809–1848)
6. The Best-Looking and Most Gentlemanly Bachelor
in England 181
7. Mary 211
8. Mourning, Scholarly Triumph, and a Secret New Love 233
Part Three Wordsmith in Retirement (1849–1869)
9. Back to the Thesaurus 251
10. Vibrant Until the Last Breath 267
Epilogue: The Thesaurus Through the Years 281
Acknowledgments 285
Index 290
Preface
(64) PRECURSOR, antecedent, predecessor, forerunner,
van-courier, outrider, avant-courrier.
Prelude, preamble, preface, prologue, avant-propos, proemium,
prolusion, preludium, proem, prolepsis, prolegomena, prefix,
introduction, frontispiece, groundwork.
S
ince first rolling off the presses of London’s Longman, Brown,
Green and Longmans in June 1852, Roget’s Thesaurus of English
Words and Phrases has emerged as one of the most recogniza-
ble books in the English language. A proprietary eponym like Coke or
Kleenex, Roget’s has sold nearly forty million copies.
Though nearly everyone is familiar with Roget’s, few people know
anything about Peter Mark Roget, the eminent nineteenth-century
polymath—physician, physiology expert, mathematician, inventor,
writer, editor, and chess whiz—and what motivated him to write this
immortal book.
Obsessed with words ever since he began studying Latin as a
schoolboy, Roget completed a first draft of the Thesaurus (the Latin
word for “treasure” or “treasury”) in 1805, when he was just twenty-
six. Then working as a physician in Manchester, Roget managed to
crank out this string of word lists in less than a year.
However, it was not until his retirement from science, in 1848, at
the age of sixty-nine, that Roget took on the challenge of finishing the
1
J O S H U A K E N D A L L
Thesaurus. The still spry Roget worked nonstop for nearly four years to
prepare the book for publication. He would continue to tinker with
his masterpiece until his death at the age of ninety in 1869, having
watched over the publication of some twenty-eight editions.
Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged
So as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composi-
tion clearly bore the stamp of its creator. Roget’s was a two-for-one: it
put both a book of synonyms and a topical dictionary (a compendium
of thematically arranged concepts) under one cover.
Borrowing the principles of zoological classification, Roget orga-
nized all knowledge—not just words. Just as his hero, the eighteenth-
century naturalist Carl Linnaeus, divided animals into six classes,
Roget divvied up his one thousand concepts as follows:
I. Abstract Relations
II. Space
III. Matter
IV. Intellect
V. Volition
VI. Affections
The first edition actually contains 1,002 concepts, but Roget was a
stickler for symmetry. Upon discovering that he had a couple too
many, he numbered “Absence of Intellect” 450a, and “Indiscrimina-
tion” 465a.
The one thousand headings of the 1852 edition, from which are
culled the epigraphs to each chapter in this book, were arranged not
alphabetically but according to where a given idea fit within Roget’s
classification system. In that edition, the first entry is “Existence”
(which falls under the first class, Abstract Relations). The purpose: to
help readers find le mot juste (“the right word”) for a given idea—say,
2