Peter Mark Roget E-Book

Nick Rennison

• Herausgeber: Pocket Essentials
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 171

Beschreibung

Every day thousands of people worldwide consult Roget's Thesaurus. How many stop to consider why that endlessly useful reference book is so called? Of those who know that it owes its name to the man who first devised it, how many know anything more about him?Yet Peter Mark Roget was one of the most remarkable men of the nineteenth century and he achieved much in his long life. He did not even begin the great work of classification which bears his name until he was 70. Before that, the polymathic Roget had already made his own contributions to knowledge in a dozen different fields from optics and anatomy to mathematics and education. He would probably have been surprised that his posthumous reputation rests on his thesaurus. No doubt he would have expected that it would be his involvement in the foundation of the University of London that would be his lasting legacy. Or his books on magnetism, galvanism and physiology. Or his scientific papers on persistence of vision, with their later impact on the development of motion pictures. Or his association with major thinkers such as the computer pioneer Charles Babbage and the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The range of his interests was astonishing and, for sixty years, he was at the centre of the intellectual revolution of his times.Nick Rennison's biography reveals the full story of Roget's involvement with the great issues and the great personalities of the nineteenth century and recounts the forgotten life behind one of the most famous of all reference books.

Leseprobe

Peter Mark Roget: The Man Who Became a Book

Every day thousands of people worldwide consult Roget’s Thesaurus. How many stop to consider why that endlessly useful reference book is so called? Of those who know that it owes its name to the man who first devised it, how many know anything more about him?

Yet Peter Mark Roget was one of the most remarkable men of the nineteenth century and he achieved much in his long life. He did not even begin the great work of classification which bears his name until he was 70. Before that, the polymathic Roget had already made his own contributions to knowledge in a dozen different fields from optics and anatomy to mathematics and education. He would probably have been surprised that his posthumous reputation rests on his thesaurus. No doubt he would have expected that it would be his involvement in the foundation of the University of London that would be his lasting legacy. Or his books on magnetism, galvanism and physiology. Or his scientific papers on persistence of vision, with their later impact on the development of motion pictures. Or his association with major thinkers such as the computer pioneer Charles Babbage and the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The range of his interests was astonishing and, for sixty years, he was at the centre of the intellectual revolution of his times.

Nick Rennison’s biography reveals the full story of Roget’s involvement with the great issues and the great personalities of the nineteenth century and recounts the forgotten life behind one of the most famous of all reference books.

Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in the Victorian era and in crime fiction. He has written several Pocket Essential guides published by Oldcastle Books including Short History of the Polar Exploration, Roget, Freud and Robin Hood. He is also the author of The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction, 100 Must-Read Crime Novels and Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography. His debut crime novel, Carver’s Quest, set in nineteenth century London, was published by Atlantic Books. He is a regular reviewer for both The Sunday Times and BBC History Magazine.

Peter Mark Roget

The Man Who Became a Book

NICK RENNISON

PETER MARK ROGET

1779–1869

Contents

Introduction

1: Early Years

2: Roget Abroad

3: From Manchester to Bloomsbury

4: Tragedy Strikes

5: Epidemics, Phrenology and Physiology

6: Roget and the Royal Society

7: Roget and his Thesaurus

8: Roget’s Last Years

Further Reading

Websites

Introduction

Every day thousands of people consultRoget’s Thesaurus.It has a place on the bookshelves of English speakers around the world. Look in the reference section of any bookshop or the databases of internet booksellers and you willfind dozens of current editions of a work that wasfirst published more than a century and a half ago. International Roget’s Thesaurus, Students’ Roget’s, Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, Pocket Roget’s Thesaurus. The list goes on and on. The influence of Roget’s Thesaurus has extended from the work of academic linguists and computer scientists to the dead parrot sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in which much of the humour derives from John Cleese running through a list of synonyms for ‘dead’ that has quite clearly been culled from the famous reference book.

Yet how many of those who consult it stop to consider why that endlessly useful work is called Roget’s Thesaurus? Of those who know that it owes its name to the man whofirst devised it, how many know anything more about him? A little investigation shows that Peter Mark Roget was one of the more remarkable men of his day and he achieved much in a long life that stretched from the years when Britain wasfighting rebellious colonists in the American War of Independence to the high Victorian era. He did not even begin seriously to compile the great work of classification which bears his name until he was 70. Before that, the polymathic Roget had already made his own contributions to knowledge in a dozen differentfields, from optics and anatomy to mathematics and education. He might well have been surprised if he had been able to discover that his posthumous reputation rests entirely on his thesaurus. No doubt he would have expected that his involvement in medical education would prove to be an equally lasting legacy. Or his books on magnetism, galvanism and physiology. Or his work on visual perception and the scientific paper on persistence of vision, which was to have an impact he could not have suspected on the later development of motion pictures. Or his association with the Royal Society, then as now the country’s most prestigious scientific society, of which he was Secretary for more than twenty years. The range of Roget’s interests was remarkable and, for the best part of seven decades, he played a leading role in British intellectual and scientific life.

Any list of his friends and acquaintances is like a roll call of the great, the good and the greatly gifted in Britain from the late Georgian period to the high Victorian era. Here is a man who inhaled mind-altering substances with Wordsworth and Coleridge; swapped ideas with James Watt, Jeremy Bentham, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday; crossed swords with the computer pioneer Charles Babbage and the geologist Charles Lyell. Here is a man who was often at the cutting edge of nineteenth-century research into everything from electricity to infectious diseases. Yet today, although his name lives on in the title of a reference work, the man himself has been largely forgotten. There has been only one major biography of him in the last hundred years and that was published in 1970. This book is not an attempt to match the groundbreaking work of DL Emblen in Peter Mark Roget: The Man and the Word, which remains the definitive life, but it does try to rescue Roget from the indifference of posterity and to provide a short survey of his long and richly productive life.

Early Years

When Peter Mark Roget was born, George III was nineteen years into his sixty-year-long reign. When he died, Queen Victoria was thirty-two years into her even longer period on the throne. During the ninety years he was alive, Britain and the world changed dramatically. At the time he was born, the country was fighting an ultimately unsuccessful war to retain control of its most prized colonies in North America and prophets of doom were proclaiming the end of the nation’s greatness. When he died, Britain was the centre of a vast worldwide empire, on the verge of an expansion into Africa that would make it even vaster. In the year of his birth, the first all cast-iron bridge in the world was completed in Shropshire, Captain Cook was killed by natives on a Hawaiian beach and Napoleon’s future wife Josephine was married to her first husband, the Vicomte de Beauharnais. In the year of his death, Stanley set off on his journey into Africa in search of Dr Livingstone, the first women’s college at Cambridge was founded and the Suez Canal was opened. The railways, unknown until Roget was in his forties, spanned the country, the industrial revolution had forever altered the lives of millions and the population of London, under a million at the time Roget’s arrival increased it by one, had swelled to closer to four million. The world of Roget’s childhood had largely vanished.

That childhood began in London. Broadwick Street runs through the centre of Soho. It was once known simply as Broad Street (the name changed in 1936) and it was in this largely unremarkable thoroughfare that Peter Mark Roget was born on 18 January 1779. (Broad Street’s other major claim to fame is that it was the birthplace of the poet, engraver and visionary William Blake who entered the world in a room in his father’s house there in 1758.) His parents, married the previous year, were Jean and Catherine Roget. Jean, born in 1751, came from a family which could trace its residence in Geneva back to the fifteenth century at least and it was in that city that he had made his debut in life. He had moved to London as a young man to act as the pastor of the French Protestant Church in Soho. Catherine was a member of his congregation when they met, the daughter of a Frith Street jeweller named Peter Romilly whose parents had fled from France in the late seventeenth century when Louis XIV’s so-called Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had, in effect, made Protestantism illegal in that country. She was also the older sister of Samuel Romilly, a law student at Gray’s Inn at the time of his sister’s marriage but a man destined to become both an important legal reformer and a major influence on his nephew.

Of his father, Peter Mark Roget was to know little. Only months after the boy’s birth, Jean Roget, suffering from tuberculosis, was told by doctors that his life would be severely shortened if he continued to live amidst the smoke and pollution of London. The answer was for the pastor and his wife to leave the city (and indeed England) and to travel to Switzerland, the country in which Jean had been born and in which many of his family still lived. Entrusting the young Peter Mark to the care of his grandfather, the jeweller Peter Romilly, Jean and Catherine Roget journeyed to Geneva and then to Lausanne in the hope that the Swiss air would prove beneficial to the sickly pastor. It soon became clear that Jean was unlikely ever to be well enough to return to England and plans were made to reunite all the family. Just over a year later, the young boy was brought by his uncle, Samuel Romilly, to join his parents in Switzerland. A daughter named Annette was born on 29 April 1783 but Jean Roget’s health continued to deteriorate. Exactly a month after his daughter made her debut in the world, he died. Samuel Romilly wrote to his sister to offer the consolations of faith (‘He is now assuredly rewarded for his virtues by that God in whom he has always firmly believed’) but the truth was that Catherine was faced by difficult circumstances. A young widow left alone with two children, she had been left with little financial support and was far from home. The only solution to her problems was to return to England.

When she first came back to England, together with her four-year-old son and her newly-born baby daughter, Catherine lodged with family but it was not long before what was to be a lifelong characteristic emerged. Catherine had an inability to settle anywhere permanently. She seemed always to believe that life would be bound to improve for her and her children if she upped sticks and moved on to pastures new. Over the next decade, she and Peter and Annette were living, at different times, in Kensington and Cheltenham, Dover and Rochester and in a number of other small towns scattered around the country from Devon to Derbyshire. In Kensington, for example, the family lodged on and off with the Chauvet family as paying guests for several years and Peter’s earliest schooling took place in the academy for young gentlemen established in Kensington Square in 1786 by David Chauvet, another former resident of Geneva.

During the upheaval and turmoil, much of it self-inflicted, that characterised Catherine’s life during these years, only one aim remained constant. Peter must receive a sound education. The Huguenot and Protestant community to which she belonged believed profoundly in the benefits of education, both for its own value and as a means to material and social advancement. It was through education that Peter was to succeed in life. Her letters are filled with details of her son’s intellectual progress. From the first, it was the sciences rather than the arts that appealed to the young boy. ‘Peter ever eager after new studies,’ she wrote to her brother when her son was twelve years old, ‘has for this while left this world and lived wholly in the Starry regions. He hired Ferguson on Astronomy, and has been copying off tables and making circles ever since. He gave us yesterday a three hours lecture on Astronomy – Nanette and myself (his only auditors) began at last to be quite weary.’ It was clear, from an early age, that Peter was destined for some kind of intellectual achievement and was highly unlikely to become a success in any other sphere. ‘His mind will, I see, never bend to business except it was nearly connected with books,’ his mother acknowledged as her son entered adolescence.

When he was fourteen, the decision was made that Peter should study at Edinburgh University and that he should take medicine as his subject for study. On 4 October 1793, after a leisurely journey northwards which had taken several weeks, mother, daughter and son arrived in the Scottish capital. At the time Edinburgh University was one of the foremost academic institutions in Europe, with a reputation for excellence arguably greater than that of Oxford or of Cambridge. The great age of the Scottish Enlightenment, in which intellectuals from north of the border like David Hume and Adam Smith had gained fame across Europe, was only just over. Yet the renown their presence had brought to Scotland still remained. Edinburgh University had played its own part in the intellectual ferment of the time and the reputation of its medical school was particularly strong. Again this was in direct contrast to the English universities, where medical teaching was almost non-existent. At Cambridge, for example, successive holders of the Regius Professor of Physic did not give a single lecture to undergraduates for more than a century.

It was slightly unusual but certainly not unprecedented for someone as young as Roget to enrol as an undergraduate. David Brewster, the scientist and inventor of the kaleidoscope whom Roget came to admire greatly, entered the university in the same year at the even earlier age of twelve. The medical school at the time was filled with the distinguished, the talented and the eccentric. Among the men whose lectures Roget certainly attended was Alexander Monro II. ‘I often hear Dr. Monro who reads lectures on Anatomy in the College,’ Roget wrote to his uncle Samuel Romilly in December 1793 when he was still a few weeks short of his fifteenth birthday. ‘He has a subject at every lecture, which he dissects in the Class: the smell is sometimes offensive, when the dead body has been kept too long, as was the case yesterday.’ Monro was a member of a family that treated the university chair in anatomy almost as an hereditary possession. His father had been one of the founders of the medical school in the 1720s and a physician who was renowned throughout Europe. His son, Alexander Monro III, was teaching in the university when Charles Darwin attended lectures there in the 1820s, although Darwin had no time for the third Monro. ‘I dislike him & his lectures so much,’ he wrote in a letter home, ‘that I cannot speak with decency about them. He is so dirty in person & actions.’

James Gregory, the head of the Edinburgh Medical School in the years that Roget was a student, was another professor who had followed his father’s footsteps into the university. A combative man, who once attacked a fellow physician with a stick and beat him so badly he was forced to pay a compensatory fine, Gregory was to end his career in disgrace, charged by the Edinburgh College of Physicians with an assortment of misdemeanours and expelled from its ranks. However, in the mid-1790s, when Roget knew him, Gregory was at the height of his powers. Described by a contemporary as ‘a curious and excellent man, a great physician, a great Lecturer, a great Latin scholar and a great talker, vigorous and generous, large of stature and with a strikingly powerful countenance’, he was a notable figure in Edinburgh life. Men like Monro and Gregory were powerful personalities and they must have made a significant impact on the young and impressionable Roget.

Altogether, Roget, his mother and his sister Annette were to spend five years in Edinburgh. They were not easy times. Catherine was by no means badly off and was receiving regular sums of money from her brother Samuel, whose reputation and prosperity as a lawyer were growing, but she worried constantly about the family’s finances. Their social life, as she complained only too regularly, was dull and restricted. (Possibly one reason Catherine received few visitors during one period of several months was that, in all innocence, she had moved into lodgings in a street renowned as a haunt of prostitutes. She was mortified when she realised that many of her neighbours were, as she reported to her brother, ‘women of bad character’.) The health of all three of the Rogets suffered in the cold and damp of Edinburgh but it was Peter, the sun around which the family circled, whose well-being was of prime importance.

In the summer of 1797, he fell seriously ill. ‘He lost appetite,’ his mother reported, ‘grew weaker than ever, coughed a great deal, and began spitting up dreadful matter mixed with blood.’ For a woman who had lost her husband to tuberculosis, an illness such as this afflicting her much-loved son must have given her dreadful anxiety. Eventually time and the ministrations of doctors from the university’s medical faculty (and possibly Catherine’s own faith in a patent medicine known as Godbald’s Vegetable Balsam) brought Roget back to health but the danger had been very real.

His illness in the past, Roget was able in the following year to fulfil the examiners’ requirements and present the required thesis (his was on the laws of chemical affinity). On 25 June 1798 he was finally awarded his M D degree. He was nineteen years old. At the time of his graduation, few would have considered that he had been a particularly distinguished student but posterity has thought differently. In 2000, as part of the millennium celebrations, Edinburgh University began a scheme to erect plaques on various sites to commemorate some of the outstanding individuals connected with it through the centuries. Roget, together with David Hume, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Carlyle and others, has been one of those chosen. (Roget’s later association with Manchester is also now commemorated by a plaque in Coupland Street in the city. In London, the city where he was born and where he was to spend most of his working life, there is, sadly, no blue plaque by which Roget can be remembered.) Roget himself was clearly proud to have been a graduate of Edinburgh and continued to have fond memories of his time there. Friends he made at the university, including Lovell Edgeworth, son of a maverick inventor of Irish extraction named Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and Arthur Aikin, later to be a pioneering geologist and mineralogist, continued to be of importance to him in later life. As late as 1864, five years before his death, when he was eighty-five years old, he not only joined a newly founded Edinburgh University Club in London but agreed to serve as one of its vice-presidents.

What was the newly graduated teenage doctor to do? There were plenty of options open to him but, in the event, Roget made the decision to travel down to Bristol and to involve himself with an establishment that might have been thought by some to be on the fringes of respectable medicine. For a man whose future career was to be, in most respects, a monument to faith in establishment values, it was a curious choice of first job. The Pneumatic Institution for Inhalation Gas Therapy had been founded by Thomas Beddoes in Clifton in 1798, largely using money donated by the Wedgwood family. With apparatus for producing and inhaling gases designed by a friend of Beddoes, the famous engineer and pioneer of steam power, James Watt, the Institution was at the cutting edge of late eighteenth-century medical research. (Its buildings still stand in Dowry Square, Hotwells in Bristol, although they are now private residences.)