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

By Joshua Kendall
304 pp. G.P. Putnam Sons, 2008 $25.95

Reviewed by Tracy Ilene Miller

It fits that a man who made a lifelong habit of collecting words would one day find his name deeply connected to a book of synonyms. But as many people know the name Roget, few could identify the man by anything but his last name or his opus, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.

In fact, the thesaurus, published in 1852, only 17 years before Peter Mark Roget died, was almost a postscript to an already accomplished life. Roget made himself over many times, first as a doctor after studying at Edinburgh University, then as a scholar, writer and inventor. His medical career ended abruptly in his youth after a public denunciation of his course of treatment for his uncle and surrogate father Sir Samuel Romilly, a highly respected and publicly revered member of Parliament.

Soon after, though, Roget made a name as a scholar and secretary of the Royal Society, a post he held for more than 20 years. During that time he gained notice for his discovery of the retina’s ability to see still images as continuous, which later led to the development of motion pictures. And his contribution of a volume to the Bridgewater Treatises, a set of books on natural theology, made him the “public face of physiology in Victorian England.”

And through all of that, in a period lasting more than 50 years, Roget collected enough entries for his Thesaurus that, at the point he was pushed out of the Royal Society for possibly plagiarizing the ideas of another scholar, he was able to quickly compile and publish the book that would bring him everlasting fame. The Thesaurus has never been out of print.

In The Man Who Made Lists, Kendall proves he is a deft researcher. He provides the myriad connections Roget had to the decision-makers and people of renown as a recognized scholar and member of the Romilly family. But Kendall proves he is too good of a researcher. He includes such an abundance of detail that there is neither a full understanding of the man nor the time he lived in. Kendall imbues much of the text with detailed observations by the people around Roget to an extent they obscure and create distance to the man. We know, for instance, of Roget’s mother’s dissatisfaction with the cleanliness of the city of Bern, Switzerland, during a visit there. And Roget’s (very) brief stint as a childhood neighbor to the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Or the particulars of a romantic story told to Roget’s wife, not even to Roget, by a shipmate during a honeymoon cruise. And the peculiar history of a grandfather clock housing a mummy at the Royal Society.

But in following this minutia that is often disconnected or tenuously connected to something thematic, the history of place and other people in Roget’s life stand out more than the life of this famous man. Despite the achievements of Roget, the treatment of them in the book almost suggests they may have been better read as a list.