SYMHC Classics: Peter Roget

This 2022 episode covers Peter Roget, a doctor and scientist who really liked putting things into classification systems. His life was very dramatic well before he came up with the book that is his legacy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Peter Mark Roget was born on January eighteenth, seventeen seventy nine,
or two hundred and forty six years ago today, so
our episode on him and his thesaurus is today's Saturday Classic.
We mention a couple of subjects in this episode that
we've covered since then. Our episode on Francis Henry Edgerton,
a thirle of Bridgewater, which I specifically said would be

(00:23):
covered later, came out on February twenty first, twenty twenty two.
And our two parter that covered Humphrey davies self experimentation
with nitrous oxide was a two parter that started on
April twenty ninth, twenty twenty four. This originally came out
February second, twenty twenty two. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You

(00:45):
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and
Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
So I think it's a safe bet that if you've
done any amount of writing, you have probably stumbled across

(01:06):
Rose's thesaurus. Yeah, that's I think one of my earliest
experiences of like, here are resources in the library. Yes, uh,
and Rose was a person, Peter Mark Roge. He was
a doctor and a scientist who really liked putting things
into classification systems. But his life was quite dramatic, well

(01:28):
before he put together the book that is his legacy,
and today we are going to talk all about that.
We want to give you a heads up that this
episode contains discussion of suicide and some detailed discussion because
of an event that shaped Roget's life. So if you
would like to skip that, jump ahead about two to
three minutes to the first ad break, starting when we

(01:50):
mentioned the year eighteen eighteen. Peter Mark Roge was born
on January eighteenth, seventeen seventy nine, in London. His father,
Jean Roget, was Genevieve's pastor who had moved to England
as an adult. He died when Peter was just four
years old. His mother was Catherine Romilly, and her brother,

(02:10):
the abolitionist, legal reformer and politician, Sir Samuel Romilly, became
a significant figure in Peter's life. After his father died,
Peter referred to his uncle as his surrogate father. Peter's mother, Catherine,
has been characterized by a biographers as domineering. She was
very involved in her son's life. She likely had depression

(02:31):
and sometimes she exhibited paranoia, and she really really pushed
her son to be an achiever. When Peter was just fourteen,
his mother moved the entire family, including his sister Annette,
who likely also had depression, to Edinburgh, Scotland, so that
Peter could study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He
did not only take classes intended to prepare him for

(02:52):
a career as a doctor, though he also loved and
studied literature and philosophy. In seventeen ninety eight, the age
of nineteen, Roge graduated from medical school. Even in this
early stage of his life, he had this proclivity to
study the classification and organization of things that was really apparent.

(03:12):
His medical school thesis, which was about chemical affinities, invoked
the work of Carl Naeus and his classification system, as
well as others who had used it in their work.
One of Roge's first projects out of school was, unsurprisingly,
a system of classification. This was very, very broad in scope.
He wanted to sort all knowledge into three categories. The

(03:36):
first was the material world, which focused on natural history.
The second was the intellectual World, which included all manner
of philosophies, theories and belief systems. And the third was
the World of Signs, which was really about words and communication,
and he collaborated on this work with a philosopher, Dougald Stewart,
but it was never published. In seventeen ninety nine, rog

(03:59):
was published for the first time in the Journal of
Thomas Beddows. This is a series of notes regarding consumption
as it related to various professions. Roget also joined Beto's
research facility, the Pneumatic Medical Institution that was in Bristol, England.
In Bedows's group, Roge worked alongside Humphrey Davy experimenting with

(04:20):
gases and their possible medical uses. One of the things
that they worked on were possible pain management or sedative
uses for gases like nitrous oxide. They actually published a
paper about it in eighteen hundred that was more than
forty years before such things were ever used in dental
work or surgery, and in some cases the researchers were

(04:42):
also experiment subjects. Roge wrote about his own experience with
nitrous oxide, which for him was quite disorienting. Quote, I
seemed to lose the sense of my own weight and
imagined I was sinking into the ground. I then felt
a drowsiness gradually steal over me, and a day this
inclination to motion, I was gradually roused from this torpor

(05:04):
by a kind of delirium. I felt myself totally incapable
of speaking, and for some time lost all consciousness of
where I was or who was near me. Roget did
not stay with the Bedos Institute for very long. He
left Bristol in eighteen hundred and moved east to London.
There he continued his medical studies by working with a

(05:24):
number of prominent physicians of the day. What of those
was Edward Jenner. Yeah. His connections throughout his life kind
of read like the checklist of important scientists and doctors
of the period. Peter Roget also made money during this
time as a private tutor. He was hired to educate
two boys, Burton and Nathaniel Phillips, and also to travel

(05:46):
with them on a year long trip around Europe. Roge
was twenty three when they started their trip, heading first
to Paris, where things started out quite well. They visited museums,
they walked the city, and they took in the culture
and although Roget was not exactly in love with French life.
He wrote some very disparaging things about the French people.

(06:07):
He was happy to be making money and traveling, and
when they moved on to Geneva he found that to
be quite enjoyable. But then they got trapped there. On
May eighteenth, eighteen oh three, Britain declared war on France,
and Napoleon Bonaparte declared that all adult British citizens and
French territories were prisoners of war. That means Roget was

(06:29):
part of that group. Much to his shock and surprise.
His charges, though, were not affected. They were under eighteen,
and he didn't just want to send them off on
their own, hoping they would make it home safely. They
tried to petition the French government for an exemption because
of their situation, but when that failed, he started reaching
out to their father's business contacts in Switzerland to try

(06:51):
to find these boys a safe haven. He moved the
boys first to Lausanne and then to Nuqtel. Then he
did something ingenius. So if you'll remember we mentioned at
the top of this episode that his father, Jean Roget,
was from Geneva, Peter did an impressive bit of bureaucratic dancing,
and in less than twenty four hours he managed to

(07:13):
track down his deceased father's birth certificate and a government
official to provide certification that Peter was Jean's son and
thus eligible for Genevieve's citizenship. This whole business had, according
to Roge, required a bribe. This let him get a
limited passport to rejoin the Phillips brothers, but then to

(07:34):
get home they had to sneak through small towns, never
speaking English in front of anybody, making some more bribes
along the way. Eventually they got to unoccupied Germany and
from there they were able to get passage home. Roge
later wrote of this ordeal quote, it is impossible to
describe the rapture we felt in treading on friendly ground.
It was like awaking from a horrid dream, or recovering

(07:56):
from a nightmare. Back in England, in eighteen o five,
Roge moved to Manchester and took a job at the
public Infirmary. In addition to his work as a public
health physician, he also put together a lecture series there
several in fact, the first was eighteen lecturers grouped together
as an offering of the College of Arts and Sciences,

(08:18):
and in these classes he returned, as ever to his
love of classification to form the curriculum. Physiology was broken
down into four units of classification covering the human respiratory, nervous,
mechanical and reproductive functions. He also taught animal physiology, although
that was separated out into a different course of fifteen lectures.

(08:40):
Because of his efforts and assembling those educational courses, he's
credited with starting Manchester's first medical school, but Manchester didn't
keep Roge for long either. In eighteen oh eight he
moved once again to London. He set up a private
practice but also continued teaching. This time it was at
the Russell Institution, and he built on the lecture plans

(09:01):
he had worked on in Manchester. In eighteen oh nine
he finally gained his Royal College of Physicians license, and
at that point he joined the Medical and Triururgical Society.
In eighteen eleven he became the Society's secretary, and in
that role he headed up to society's periodical transactions. In
eighteen twelve he published his own paper in it, which

(09:22):
was about the detection of arsenic in poisoning cases. That
same year he also became the professor of Comparative anatomy
at the Royal Institution. Throughout his time as a lecturer there,
establishing a framework of classification for any subject was always
imparted in his lectures. One of the major concepts he
was working on through all of his practice and teaching

(09:44):
was the idea that the brain itself was subconsciously classifying
things just as part of a person's perception of the world,
and he referred to the brain as quote an organ
of association. He innovated outside of physiology inventing a device
in a eighteen fourteen that he called a log log scale.
This it was a spiral slide rule that could add

(10:06):
the logarithms of logarithms. The paper on this was published
in eighteen fifteen and it contributed to Roget becoming a
Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Eighteen fifteen also
marked the beginning of a new job that was decidedly
in Peter Rose's lane. He started working with Encyclopedia Britannica,
and his writing there included biographies of various scientists and

(10:29):
thinkers of the day, as well as articles about medical
science itself, and this writing truthfully is a little bit
of a mixed bag if you look at it now.
It was all pretty advanced for the early nineteenth century,
but today, obviously a lot of it is outdated or
just flat out wrong. He wrote a significant article on
the kaleidoscope, which expanded available knowledge of optics in the

(10:50):
workings of the human eye, and he produced a lengthy
article on physiology, and in that physiology writing he continued
to espouse his approach to categorize the workings of the
human body. This was where an area that roget had
been interested in really came to the forefront. That was
the nervous system. At this time, knowledge of the nervous

(11:12):
system and exactly how it functioned were still pretty primitive.
That was something Roge acknowledged in his writing, But he
did note, as others before him had, that the nervous
system quote bears a greater resemblance to the transmission of
the electric agency along conducting wires than to any other
fact we are acquainted with in nature. In eighteen eighteen,

(11:34):
Rogee's family went through a horrible series of tragedies. It
began with his aunt Anne, that was the wife of
Sir Samuel Romilly, dying of cancer on October twenty ninth
of that year. Peter had been her doctor. Samuel had
been at her bedside for weeks in the end, for
going sleep and food, and once she died, his own

(11:55):
physical and mental health quickly declined from the neglect and
the stress of the situation. On November two, Sir Romilly
asked his daughter Sophia to go get Peter roget. Peter
was also his doctor, so this wasn't a surprising request
for somebody who was obviously ill, But when Rosee arrived,
it became apparent immediately that this errand had been a ruse.

(12:18):
Romilly had wanted privacy because he intended to end his life.
Once Sophia had left, he had cut his own throat,
and Peter arrived just afterward. Rose tried to treat his uncle,
but after scribbling down the cryptic words quote my dear
I wish on a piece of paper, Romily died in

(12:39):
his arms. After that, Peter's mother, Catherine, also fell into
her own deep depression. She became very, very paranoid. She
was certain that the house staff was working toward her demise,
and she progressively became kind of closed off from everyone.
She alternated between paranoid episodes in near catatonia for the

(12:59):
remains of her life. Coming up, we'll talk about how
Peter Roget's work at the lectern was what helped get
him through all of this. First, though, we'll take a
quick sponsor break. Unsurprisingly, given what he had just been through,

(13:23):
Peter took several months off of work after his uncle's death,
and he also wrote to a friend that his confidence
was deeply shaken. He wasn't even sure he should be
a doctor anymore. But he also knew that he couldn't
easily switch professions at that point in his life, and
so he restarted his career sort of by going back
to lecturing at the Royal Institution. He described it as

(13:45):
like starting at the bottom of the ladder and just rebuilding.
But his lectures there were very well received and very
well reviewed, and this reinvigorated his passion for his profession.
He realized that he really was better at educating in
research than he it working with patients, so he slowly
cut back on his time in practice until he was

(14:05):
working entirely in writing and lecturing. It also took him
several years to complete an entry for Encyclopedia Britannica under
the heading of physiology, but when it was completed this
was a significant addition to the compendium. One of the
interesting things here is his assertion that mental functions like
remembering and thinking are not for physiologists, but for psychologists

(14:29):
to contemplate. Of course, we know they're interlinked and their
physiological processes involved, but at the time he was like, no, no,
we're just going to talk about the mechanics. Peter Roget's
Encyclopedia entry that examined deafness and muteness was quite insightful
actually for its time. Again still pretty outdated looking at

(14:49):
it now, but he was one of the first to
really make the case that hearing and speech issues were
not indicators of any kind of lack of intelligence, which
was a commonly held and of course deeply incorrect belief
of the time, and he suggested that treatments with things
like speech therapy, sign language learning, and education in written
forms of communication could help bridge that gap. A lot

(15:12):
of what he wrote for the Encyclopedia was crossover material
that he was also working on in his own research.
The two branches of his work really fed into one another.
One particular area in which this happened was his writing
regarding the structure of the human brain. When Rog's editor
tasked him with writing an entry on cranioscopy, there were

(15:32):
a number of new ideas in the field. This entry
was needed to help people sort out all the different
ideas that people were espousing. Roge's writing in this effort
was unflinching in his criticism of some of his contemporaries.
Johann Caspar Lavataire was a theologian who had advanced his
theories that a person's appearance could offer clues to their

(15:55):
intellect and behavioral development. And he did that in the
late eighteenth century. That was not really a new idea.
Throughout the eighteenth century, that was a growing theory, and
his work was followed by the work of Franz Joseph Gall,
who developed a system called craniology. This would eventually become
known more as phrenology. For example, Gall believed that he

(16:17):
could palpate a person's head and correctly determine that person's
natural talents and skills, as well as their deficiencies. When
Rogee took a close look at all of Gall's writings
on craniology, he just found it fundamentally flawed, and he
wrote exactly that in his Britannica article on the subject,
writing quote, nothing like direct proof has been given that

(16:38):
the presence of any particular part of the brain is
essentially necessary to the carrying on of the operations of
the mind. Of Gall's methodology, Roge wrote, quote, with such
convenient logic and accommodating principles of philosophizing, it would be
easy to prove anything. We suspect, however, that on that
very account they will be reed as having proved nothing.

(17:02):
Although Roget had been thorough in his examination of craniology,
and he had explained his logic and the ways in
which he had shown Gaul's method to be faulty, there
was a significant backlash to the Encyclopedia entry. That backlash
was even among other physicians. People who were starting to
make their living as phrenologists, of course, were incensed. They

(17:25):
said that Rogge simply could not comprehend the science involved
in their work. A team of brothers, Andrew Combe, who
was a doctor and George Combe, who was a lawyer,
wrote that quote, the publishers of the Encyclopedia may yet
find cause to regret having ever had the disadvantage of
your pen about Roche. The two of them had, of

(17:45):
course started a phrenology business, and in response to their critique,
when the next edition of Encyclopedia Britannica was released, Peter
Roche had updated the article. He changed the entry title
from craniology to phrenology. He made clear that the validity
of phrenology was on phrenologist to prove, and he included

(18:05):
a twenty one page addendum to the article in which
he refuted all of the comb Brothers' points. He had
consulted numerous scientists and doctors on the matter to assure
readers that he was not writing strictly from his own experience,
and none of them quote afforded any evidence favorable to
the doctrine. After two years of back and forth with

(18:26):
the Combs brothers in print, Rage just stopped participating in
any argument about phrenology because at that point he felt
that the field was recognized as inherently flawed. Roget wrote
for other publications in addition to Encyclopedia Britannica, including the
Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, and

(18:47):
later the Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, he wrote entries on
a range of medical subjects, including tetanus, asphyxia, and aging.
Outside of requested or assigned topics from his editors, he
continued to do his own research. Somewhere in the late
eighteen teens or early eighteen twenty, Roget met Michael Faraday

(19:08):
and Joseph Plateau, and that led him to start his
own experiments in optics. He had, as we just mentioned,
already written about kaleidoscopes and their possible improvements, but at
this point he really started working with them to see
how they could be used to elicit various responses from
the human eye as a research and diagnostic tool, and
he published his findings in his paper on the Voluntary

(19:31):
Actions of the Iris in eighteen twenty. He suspected that
his claim to be able to manipulate the iris might
be met with questions, and he was clear that he
could prove his work if challenged, writing, when I have
stated that I possessed the power of dilating and contracting
at pleasure the iris, the fibers of which are usually
considered as no more under the dominion of the will

(19:53):
than the heart or blood vessels, my assertion has in
general excited. Much astonishment, however, is strictly the fact I
can easily satisfy any person who witnesses the movements. As
he was becoming really well known for his science writing,
Rogee married Mary Taylor Hobson. That was on November eighteenth,

(20:14):
eighteen twenty four, in Saint Philip's Church in Liverpool. This
was truly a love match. The couple eventually had two children.
A daughter named Catherine Mary, who went by Kate, was
born in eighteen twenty five. They also had a son,
John Lewis, born in eighteen twenty eight. Not long after
he got married, Peter wrote about the optical illusion that

(20:35):
became his most well known work in that area. It
was something that he described as quote the illusion that
occurs when a bright object is wheeled rapidly round in
a circle, giving rise to the appearance of a line
of light through the whole circumference. This became more commonly
known as the spoke illusion, and it started when Roge
simply noticed the wheel of a cart on the street

(20:57):
turning through his window. He and Mary. He had only
been married a few days at that point, they had
skipped a honeymoon, and when he saw it he apparently
said Mary, I have just noticed something truly remarkable about
human vision. He saw how the spokes of the wheel
looked like they were curved, even though he knew they
were not, and he was instantly curious about what was

(21:18):
happening with his vision and perception to create this illusion.
The story goes that he went out to the street
and flagged down a vendor with a cart and offered
to pay him if he would just roll his cart
back and forth for him for a while so he
could study the wheels. As the cart wheels turned at
his direction, Roget took detailed notes. He came to the

(21:40):
conclusion that what was happening was that his eye was
taking in the movement as frames, and what looked like
the spokes of the wheel bending was really retinal after images.
In eighteen twenty seven, Roget became Secretary of the Royal Society.
In eighteen twenty nine, Francis Henry Edge, eighth Earl of

(22:01):
Bridgewater died. Princess was an eccentric fellow and will almost
certainly be a show topic in the future, but he's
important to the life of Peter Roge because when he died,
he left eight thousand pounds to the Royal Society, with
the use of the money clearly spelled out. He wanted
the greatest minds of the day to write essays on

(22:22):
the theme quote the Goodness of God as manifested in
the Creation, and then that would be collected into book
form so that a thousand copies of it could be printed.
This project became known as the Bridgewater Treatises and it
went to press with eight parts, and of course Peter
Roje was a contributor. Oh Bridgewater, I can't wait to

(22:44):
do that episode. For a variety of reasons, Roget wrote
a two volume title for the Treatises, which was Animal
and Vegetable Physiology considered with reference to natural Theology. He
took this project extremely serious, and he ended up writing
more than six hundred pages for it, more than two
hundred and fifty thousand words, and it was all meticulously

(23:08):
organized and accompanied by illustrations. Roge believed at the time
that this was the most important project of his life.
In these pages, while explaining the most up to date
information on scientific concepts, he also made the case that
the order of nature and what appeared to him and
many others to be something that was carefully designed was

(23:29):
proof that there was a god. Roge's treatise was published
in eighteen thirty four. He had written through yet another
devastating loss. In the summer of eighteen thirty two, Mary
was diagnosed with cancer. As her illness progressed in the winter,
Roge hired Agnes Catlow to take care of the children
and their education. Agnes was also one of the illustrators

(23:52):
for Rose's Bridgewater Treatise. Mary died on April twelfth of
eighteen thirty three, and she was buried in Saint George's Church, Bloomsbury.
Peter's grief was really intense. He talked about not wanting
to be alive anymore. And through the loss and the grief,
Agnes Catlow remained she really held the household together. Yeah.

(24:12):
She and Kate were very very close for years and
years and years. And as he had come through this
darkest period of his mourning, it had been returning to
writing his treatise that had really kept Roge going. The
same year that it was published, he moved into a
new position at the Royal Institution. He became the first
to hold the role of Fullerian Professor of Physiology, just

(24:36):
As some of Rose's prior writing had garnered criticism, so
did this treatise, though this time the roles were somewhat reversed.
In eighteen thirty seven, Charles Babbage wrote an unauthorized Bridgewater
Treatise of his own, titled Quote ninth Bridgewater Treatise a Fragment.
In those he made sharp criticism of Roge's work. While

(24:58):
Babbage didn't discount the existence of God, he strongly objected
to the idea of using science to explain the divine.
Babbage's position was much more along the lines of thinking
that God had created the universe, but a deity was
not intervening in the ongoing development of natural law and
our understanding of it in the long run. While Roge

(25:20):
may have thought he was working on his most important writing,
yet his participation in the Bridgewater Treatises didn't really get
all that much attention outside of criticism. Like Babbage's. A
new person was about to enter Rog's life at this point,
and we're going to get into that right after we
hear from the sponsors. That keep stuff you missed in
history class going. In eighteen thirty seven, the family Governess

(25:52):
Agnes Catlow left her job with the Roges to set
up a school. Peter hired a woman named Margaret's Spowers
to replace, and while Roget and Spowers never married, they
soon began a romantic relationship and they lived as a couple,
although secretly they did not publicly behave as so they
were a couple. Spowers lived with Roge for the rest

(26:13):
of her life. In the eighteen forties, Peter Roge's career
took a number of hits. Marine biologist Robert Grant accused
him of taking many of his ideas and claiming them
as his own in the Bridgewater Treatise. In response, Roget
had the Lancet print all of his correspondence with Grant
from the eighteen thirties when he was working on the project.

(26:36):
That included him telling Grant that he was using the
information in the treatise and that Grant would be acknowledged
in it, which he was. Now this may look like
Grant had overblown things that still hurt Roge's reputation. Next,
Roge was criticized by the Lancet for what they felt
was him slighting another scientist by keeping his writing from

(26:58):
being published by the Royal Stiges Society and for this
the Lancet and many other scientists at the time called
for his dismissal. Then Roge was part of a bigger
scandal for the Royal Society in which the Society's Royal
Medal for Research had been given to Thomas Snowbeck erroneously.
The paper that had won had not in fact been

(27:20):
read to the Society. That was something that was part
of the rules of that metal being issued. This once
again slighted another scientist, Robert Lee, who had read a
paper in Midwifery that was lauded as exceptional but had
not received any recognition. On November thirtieth, eighteen forty seven,
Peter Roget, who was exhausted by one scandal after another,

(27:44):
resigned as Secretary of the Royal Society. He would stay
on for one more year to wrap things up. Although
he definitely had done some questionable things, he never acknowledged
any wrongdoing and called all of the accusations against him
malignant attack hacks. He had been the Royal Society's secretary
for twenty one years. Peter Roget was seventy when his

(28:07):
retirement began, but he was still eager to share his
knowledge and if you read any accounts of him, everyone
who knows him comments on how he is an extraordinary
good health, and so he was ready to just keep
going and doing things. His entire life, from the time
he was a boy, he had made lists. This had
started as simply cataloging the things around him, but that

(28:30):
habit evolved as he matured into listing things related to
his studies and then his work, and all of this
list making was something that had helped him make order
of things in the world, and many modern historians theorize
that it was the way he dealt with anxiety and depression,
particularly during the many very stressful periods of his life.

(28:50):
He had found a very practical use for one of
his collections of lists. Over the years as he was writing,
he had kept running lists of words, grouping like words
together so that he could use them for his own reference.
So he decided to revisit that list and prepare it
for publication. He had assembled a preliminary version when he

(29:10):
was in his mid twenties, but he hadn't gotten it
to the point that it was suitable for printing even
in his later life. This whole process took more than
a decade. He had started it in his early sixties,
but it wasn't until his retirement that it was ready.
In the early summer of eighteen fifty two, the first
version of Rog's Thesaurus of English words and phrases, classified

(29:33):
and arranged so as to facilitate the expression of ideas
and assist in literary composition, was published. And while he
was preparing that first edition, Peter's daughter Kate, had been
spiraling with some sort of mental illness. She bounced back
for a little while, but she soon had another what's
described as a depressive episode, and for a while Roget

(29:55):
had sent her around to visit friends and family, hoping
travel would help her. And then there was this idea
that she should be a governess because that might help
her focus on other things, but she could not get
a placement anywhere. Finally, Roget set her up in her
own place with a small staff, essentially kind of banishing
the problem from his household. His son and the rest

(30:17):
of the family were pretty mortified that he had done this.
Kate did get better, though, and after Margaret's Powers died
of breast cancer in eighteen fifty two, she moved back
home with her father for good. The word thesaurus means
treasure in Latin, and that was exactly what the author
hoped it would be. Roge stated his intent quite clearly

(30:39):
in the thesaurus's introduction quote, the present work is intended
to supply, with respect to the English language, a desideratum
hitherto unsupplied in any language, namely, a collection of the
words it contains, and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it,
arranged not in alphabetical order, as they are at a dictionary,
but according to the the ideas which they express. For

(31:02):
this purpose, the words and phrases of the language are
here classed not according to their sound or their orthography,
but strictly according to their signification. This is verbose gent that.
But yeah, Peter Roche, the introduction to that thesaurus is
so long, like the preface is very long. Now. Often

(31:25):
if you were to purchase at thesaurus today, even if
it is a Roge thesaurus, it will be in what's
called dictionary form, meaning that it is alphabetical. But the
initial editions were, and some still are, as Rege's introduction indicated,
organized by ideas. He broke them down into classes. Class
one was words expressing abstract relations. The subheaders here were existence, relation, quantity, order, number, time, change,

(31:53):
and causation. Class two is words relating to space, with
the subheader's space and j general dimensions, form and motion.
Class three was words related to matter, including matter in general,
inorganic matter, and organic matter. Class four is where things
really get intense. This is the words relating to the

(32:14):
intellectual faculties, and this is broken down into two sections
of its own. First is formation of ideas, which covers
everything from operations for intellect in general all the way
to creative thought, and second is communication of ideas, which
includes nature of ideas, communicated, modes of communication, and means

(32:36):
of communication. Class five is words relating to the voluntary powers,
and it's broken down into two sections. Like Class four was,
this time individual volition and intersocial volition, and class six
is words relating to these sentient and moral powers. That's
broken down by types of affections. If all this sounds

(32:57):
kind of confusing, once you start exploring it, it starts
to feel pretty intuitive. It has a certain flow to it,
but for folks who never quite got that vibe. There
was also an alphabetical index in the back and total
there were a thousand headings. I definitely remember like having
the Roges Thesaurus in this form in the public library,

(33:20):
and like thumbing through it. Yeah, and Roget had intended
for it to be easy and intuitive. Writing later in
that rather long introduction I mentioned quote, it is to
those who are thus painfully groping their way and struggling
with the difficulties of composition, that this work professes to

(33:40):
hold out a helping hand. The inquirer can readily select,
out of the ample collection spread out before his eyes
in the following pages those expressions which are best suited
to his purpose, and which might not have occurred to
him without such assistance. In order to make this selection,
he scarcely even need engage in any critical or elaborate

(34:01):
study of the subtle distinctions existing between synonymous terms, for
if the materials set before him be sufficiently abundant and instinctive,
tact will rarely fail to lead him to the proper choice.
And people really liked it. One reviewer noted that you
could read through the entire book because Roge had arranged

(34:21):
things in such a way that they had a very
pleasing flow. It was enjoyable to move through it. The
concept was embraced really quickly, and soon there were more
printings needed. Roget continued to add to his entries and
to refine them, something that all of his years of
writing for encyclopedias had no doubt prepared him for. In
September eighteen sixty nine, Roge visited the village of West

(34:44):
Alvern on vacation, and he died there on September twelfth,
at the age of ninety. He had continued to revise
his thesaurus right up to the end of his life,
and when he died, his son John took over his editor.
More than forty mon million copies of roges Thesaurus have
been sold over the years. In nineteen twenty five, Peter

(35:05):
Rose was deemed the Saint of Crosswordia by New York
Times magazine. There are also many other things he's been called.
One thing that we will talk about in our behind
the scenes Okay, his life was a wild ride, so
much more than I had anticipated. Yes, I was trying
to go for a no bummers episode, and then I

(35:25):
got to all of the sad parts and I say, yeah,
too late, hot plate, YEP, I understand this for sure.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe

(35:48):
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.