Birthday, anniversary, fete day, saint's day, birthright, natal day: Roget and his thesaurus

To celebrate the birthday of Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), Henry Bemis Books is pleased to offer a double feature:

Joshua Kendall, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus (G.P. Putnam’s, 2008, 1st edition, first printing). ISBN 978-0-399-15462-1. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, 297 pp, fine condition. HBB price: $20.

Roget’s International Thesaurus, New Edition (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1946, 13th printing, 1957). 1194 pages. The famous, red cloth version with which generations grew up; no dust jacket, some fading along the textblock fore edges and foxing at the end papers, but very good otherwise. Call it “the patina of a certain age.” HBB price: $20.

Son of a Swiss clergyman who emigrated to Britain, Roget was one of the obsessive-compulsive outcrops of a family of whom Thomas Mallon- reviewing Kendall’s book, wrote, 

“Madness did not just run in his family; it galloped, sped, sprinted, dashed and made haste...“The Man Who Made Lists” outlines the “chronic mental instability” of Roget’s maternal grandmother; the “psychotic trance” in which his mother spent her last days after a life of neurotic “neediness”; the breakdowns undergone by Roget’s sister and daughter (he married late and was widowed early); and the grief-driven, throat-slashing suicide of his uncle, the great British civil libertarian Samuel Romilly, who expired in Roget’s blood-soaked arms.

“Roget himself turned out humorless and judgmental, beset with a “paranoid streak” as well as melancholy and shyness, not to mention a horror of “dirt and disorder” — the Thesaurus entry for “uncleanness” is a lollapalooza. So one can scarcely be surprised by the refuge he seems to have taken in workaholism and an assortment of small compulsions, including his “obsession with counting.” (“I every day go up at least 320 steps.”) He took particular pleasure in an ability to control the movements of the iris in his own eye.”

Roget’s life seemed to be one giant effort at applying a clinical detachment to every experience of life. Rather than feel, he categorized. He read medicine at Edinburgh, then worked- briefly- with lions of the scientific/philosophical world like Erasmus Darwin, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Beddoes, whose studies of laughing gas produced no mirth in Roget at all (Roget loathed Darwin and Beddoes for their obesity, and Bentham for the slovenly keep of his tools).

Roget was, in the parlance of the day, a man of parts. He held lectureships in physiology and psychology and championed a sort of intelligent design theory to explain the discoveries of paleontology. He conducted experiments with electricity and did studies of how the eye splits motion into frozen single images when perceived through, say, the spokes of a wheel, thus advancing the theoretical underpinnings of motion picture photography. He invented a slide rule. He was a chess expert and, stuck in the squalor of Manchester in 1805, designed a new public health and sanitation system. At night, he began noodling around with a system for categorizing words.

Roget’s triumph was The Thesaurus, which Mallon calls 

“a retirement venture carried out when Roger was in his 70s, may have been prompted by a reissuing, in 1849, of “British Synonymy,” a handbook of definitional equivalents first published a half-century earlier by Hester Lynch Piozzi, known to devotees of Dr. Johnson as his friend Mrs. Thrale. Freshly exasperated by the volume’s haphazardness, Roget soon set to work in earnest on his own production.

“Never quite intended as a book of synonyms (Roget thought there “really was no such thing,” given the unique meaning of every word), the Thesaurus was constructed as a crystal palace of abstraction, each of whose 1,000 lists pushes a reader, often antonymically, to the next, “certainty” leading to “uncertainty” leading to “reasoning” leading to “sophistry.” The truth is that most users of the Thesaurus have never made head nor tail of the system and have just availed themselves of the index — added by Roget almost as an afterthought — to find what they are looking for.”

Roget’s work was carried on, through revision after revision, for a full century by his son and grandson. After it passed into the public domain, it assumed many forms, all in its creator’s name. Its creator lived to the age of ninety, after which his book would have characterized him- like the Monty Python Norwegian Blue Parrot- as dead, lifeless, without life, demised, defunct, departed, gone west, no more, finished, and bereft of life.