The Man Who Made Lists

I got interested in doing a biography of the British physician and writer Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) after finding out about all kinds of fascinating documents that no other writer had seen. In 1992, Roget’s great-grandson John Romilly Roget—the family member who had taken the greatest interest in his legacy—began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, and a London auction house sold off a batch of Peter Roget’s papers in John Roget’s possession. These manuscripts included letters and journals as well as the first draft of his immortal Thesaurus, which Roget had completed in 1805—nearly fifty years before the book’s publication. Personal information on Roget has, as many commentators have long lamented, been sorely lacking. To date, most biographical accounts have focused on the content of his many scientific publications, for during his lifetime he was best known as the face of Victorian physiology. I was excited because I sensed that these newly available documents would enable me to discover what made him tick and how he went about creating his literary masterpiece.

I tried. Unfortunately, nearly all of his homes have been torn down, such as the one at 39 Bernard Street in London—right near the Russell Square Underground Station—where he lived from 1809 to 1843. Roget’s childhood residences in London are no longer standing. In Edinburgh, I walked the streets he must have walked during his five-year stint as a medical student. I also located the sites of his two apartments in Manchester, where he worked as a doctor from 1804 to 1808. Roget wrote the first draft of the Thesaurus in his apartment on King Street, which was, and still is, in the heart of Manchester’s banking district. I went to the home of Roget’s uncle Samuel Romilly, who lived at 21 Russell Square in London. Roget’s house on Bernard Street was just around the corner, and he was a frequent visitor. In May 2006, I knocked on the front door and, to my delight, received a warm welcome. The building belongs to University College of London (UCL), and while the university was deciding what department to install there, some squatters—a bevy of twentysomething anarchists—were living on the premises. They showed me the third-story bedroom where Romilly died from a self-inflicted wound. Though the blue plaque on the front of the building describes Romilly as a celebrated law reformer, the coed sharing that upstairs room with her boyfriend didn’t know about its famous former resident. After I explained what had happened, almost two centuries ago, in her room, the young woman’s mother, who was visiting that day, pulled me aside and reprimanded me: “I wish you hadn’t said anything. She’s had a rough semester.”

In London, I met Ursula Roget, his great-granddaughter. (John Romilly Roget, now deceased, was her older brother.) Ursula, who was born in 1908, invited me for tea at her apartment on Sloane Avenue in Chelsea. Her father, Samuel Romilly Roget, was the third editor of the Thesaurus. (Peter Roget’s son, John, was the second.) Ursula and her brother belonged to the first generation of Rogets who didn’t go into the family business. But she happens to be an avid crossword puzzle fan, and she frequently consults the family book. In fact, during my interview, she whipped out what she described as her “tatty” copy, a dog-eared paperback version of the 1982 British Thesaurus held together by a big piece of red tape. She made me promise that I would get the word out to Americans that the family name is pronounced “Row-zhay”—not “Roggit.”

Though Roget spent plenty of time immersed in his scholarly projects (he would work either in his study on Bernard Street or in the British Museum around the corner), he led an active social life. He didn’t necessarily have the best social skills—he much preferred lecturing to conversation—but he was good at networking. Through his active involvement in dozens of London’s prestigious scientific and literary organizations, such as the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Athenaeum Club, he came into contact with just about everyone who was anyone in British letters during the first half of the nineteenth century. Among his friends and colleagues were the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth; the political scientists Francis Horner, David Ricardo, and Jeremy Bentham; and the scientists Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) and David Brewster, the inventor of the kaleidoscope.

I experienced a wide range of emotions toward him. At times, I greatly admired his ingenuity and his thoroughness. He had a lightning-quick mind that was always exploring new connections—whether between words or objects. As I describe in the book, one morning when he was staring out of the vertical wooden blinds in his basement window, he noticed an optical illusion—that the spokes of a moving cart wheel appeared to be curved. Roget attributed this to the fact that an impression made on the retina can remain even after the object in question has passed from view. He immediately dashed off a theoretical paper; because of its insights, he later came to be called “the grandfather of the movies.” Yet I often found myself getting angry with him. Roget could be callous toward others, even those he loved. When his sister was dumped by the love of her life—the man she wanted to marry—he criticized her for feeling sad. And when his daughter, Kate, was saddled with depression, he was likewise unsympathetic; he even banished her to a rented house in the country. Though he possessed a keen analytic mind, Roget lacked much insight into himself. As I show in the book, he had all the symptoms of what today is called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Though it wasn’t exactly diagnosed as such in his day, Roget didn’t seem to be at all aware that he possessed any odd predilections, such as his love of neatness, order, and lists. At times, I felt as if I knew him better than he knew himself.

ILike many writers and intellectuals, Roget turned to books in part to escape from his troubled family environment. In his case, his father died when he was only four, and his mother could be emotionally demanding and intrusive. Immersing myself in Roget’s inner world made me appreciate how much my own bookishness as a child was rooted in my family circumstances. My mother, who died a few years ago, was moody, and I never seemed able to connect with her. I was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and, unlike my mother, wasn’t terribly interested in checking out the latest apparel at Bloomingdale’s. Like Roget, who began writing Latin words in his treasured notebook at the age of eight, I became a classics jock. At fifteen, I went away to a fancy New England prep school. Once I got there, I found that Latin and Greek constituted a safe refuge from social pressures. I too took great pride in my Latin notebooks, which consisted of my translations of texts by Cicero, Virgil, and others. And while Roget’s mother wrote all over the back of his notebook, my mother threw mine out while I was away at college (“I was just straightening up,” she later explained). I always knew that someday my many Latin courses—including one on prose composition—would come in handy. As was required of medical students in Edinburgh at the time, Roget wrote his dissertation in Latin. It hasn’t yet been translated into English, and I am the first person to write about it.

After examining his juvenilia, I was surprised to learn that the adolescent Roget was a terrible writer. His prose was vague and rambling. As he acknowledged in the preface to the Thesaurus, he created a draft of his famous book while he was in his early twenties to “supply [his] own deficiencies.” With his own private word lists by his side, he developed into a fluid writer. Though Roget’s adult prose sometimes lacked zest, it was eminently clear.

A Frenchman, Abbé Girard, put together the first book of synonyms in the early eighteenth century. The first uniquely British one, which wasn’t simply a translation of Girard, was written by Hester Piozzi, who was a close confidante of Samuel Johnson’s. But Roget didn’t just write a new synonym book, he created a new genre. His Thesaurus was a two-for-one: it united a synonym book and a topical dictionary—a compendium of ideas—under one cover. With his elaborate numerical classification system, Roget turned synonymy into a science.

Actually I have two, of which I’m equally fond: (450a) Absence of Intellect and (465a) Indiscrimination. A stickler for round numbers, Roget sought to divide the world into exactly 1,000 concepts. When he found he had 1,002, he had to figure out some way to preserve the symmetry. Curiously, Roget lists no synonyms under Absence of Intellect, but simply refers readers to (499) Imbecility—which happens to be one of the longest entries in the book. Now, that’s no surprise, because Roget couldn’t stand “vacancy of mind,” “stolidity,” or “doltishness.”