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Daniel Macklin. Oliver Pritchett on Roget's Thesaurus

He Had His Little Lists

‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ You see, even Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a bit of a list-maker. Of course, our love affair with lists goes back a lot further than her. Think of the first Book of Chronicles in the Old Testament: ‘And Nahshon begat Salma, and Salma begat Boaz, and Boaz begat Obed, and Obed begat Jesse . . .’ And so the begetting goes on and on. Surely, when Moses came down from the mountain top with the Ten Commandments he was bringing us an important early example of a not-to-do list.

For many people, Christmas is the most important list festival of the year – who is getting our Christmas cards, who is getting what present, things that still need to be bought. At that first Christmas, perhaps, Melchior took a piece of papyrus and wrote down, ‘Get frankincense.’ (It would be the wise thing to do.)

There is something comforting about making lists. When I was at boarding-school, to pass the time in geography lessons, we would write down the names of the top world cricketers we would select for an Earth v. Mars match – Denis Compton was always on it. I suppose lists give us the illusion that there is order in our lives – or that the chaos is manageable. Faced with an agonizing choice, we may even get a sheet of paper and write ‘For’ and ‘Against’ at the top of two columns, to convince ourselves that our choice is logical.

Journalists nowadays have become addicted. Articles are evolving into Listicles, offering us ‘Twenty Things You Never Knew about Ignorance’ or ‘The World’s Top Ten Listings Magazines’. I suppose these are considered to be a more digestible form of prose for readers whose attention span is shaky.

It is sometimes argued that to-do lists are a device we use to avoid doing things. They are ‘where important tasks go to die’ according to Kevin Kruse, author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management – a title which suggests he is no

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‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ You see, even Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a bit of a list-maker. Of course, our love affair with lists goes back a lot further than her. Think of the first Book of Chronicles in the Old Testament: ‘And Nahshon begat Salma, and Salma begat Boaz, and Boaz begat Obed, and Obed begat Jesse . . .’ And so the begetting goes on and on. Surely, when Moses came down from the mountain top with the Ten Commandments he was bringing us an important early example of a not-to-do list.

For many people, Christmas is the most important list festival of the year – who is getting our Christmas cards, who is getting what present, things that still need to be bought. At that first Christmas, perhaps, Melchior took a piece of papyrus and wrote down, ‘Get frankincense.’ (It would be the wise thing to do.) There is something comforting about making lists. When I was at boarding-school, to pass the time in geography lessons, we would write down the names of the top world cricketers we would select for an Earth v. Mars match – Denis Compton was always on it. I suppose lists give us the illusion that there is order in our lives – or that the chaos is manageable. Faced with an agonizing choice, we may even get a sheet of paper and write ‘For’ and ‘Against’ at the top of two columns, to convince ourselves that our choice is logical. Journalists nowadays have become addicted. Articles are evolving into Listicles, offering us ‘Twenty Things You Never Knew about Ignorance’ or ‘The World’s Top Ten Listings Magazines’. I suppose these are considered to be a more digestible form of prose for readers whose attention span is shaky. It is sometimes argued that to-do lists are a device we use to avoid doing things. They are ‘where important tasks go to die’ according to Kevin Kruse, author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management – a title which suggests he is not above a bit of list-making himself. They can certainly be a way of putting off something you have to do. I, for example, set out to write a piece about Roget’s Thesaurus, but you will notice that I have sidetracked myself into compiling a catalogue of lists. Before I turn to the matter in hand, there are a few more things I should like to say on this subject, if you don’t mind . . . Alice Instone, the English artist, recently mounted an exhibition in London called ‘The Pram in the Hall’. Taking its title from the famous words of the critic Cyril Connolly that the pram in the hall was the ‘sombre enemy of good art’ the exhibition set out to show how trivial chores invade the lives of women. It featured the to-do lists of people such as Bianca Jagger, Nicole Farhi, Sadie Frost and Shami Chakrabarti, late of Liberty. They were, in a way, self-portraits which revealed that you still have to concern yourself with the mundane things in life, like buying loo rolls, even when you are famous and successful. There is a rather more public version of the to-do list in the form of the blackboard on the kitchen wall. If I visit other people’s houses I can’t resist reading them, but I am inclined to be suspicious. Perhaps they are a display of how people would like others to see their lives. ‘Ring piano tuner,’ they say. Or: ‘Radicchio – urgent!!!!’ Or ‘Farrow and Ball: Rectory Red.’ You may be less likely to see: ‘Get dog wormed.’ Now, at last, I must get down to the main purpose of this piece. So, here goes. One of the world’s most significant list-makers was surely Peter Mark Roget, the nineteenth-century physician from a Huguenot family, inventor and mathematician, who compiled the thesaurus that still bears his name, first published in 1852 under the title Thesaurus of English words and phrases, classified and arranged so as to facilitate the expression of ideas, and assist in literary composition. He had actually started making notes for this great enterprise as early as 1805 and he began to work on it seriously in 1848. (You could say the thesaurus was on his to-do list for forty-three years.) Nowadays it is known more plainly as Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. And there are more that 300,000 words in it, regularly updated. You could call it a book of lists of synonyms, but it is much more than that. Words are grouped according to themes, such as ‘Matter’ or ‘Intellect’ or ‘Dimensions’, offering the reader alternative, and perhaps more interesting, ways of expressing ideas. A biography of Roget, by Joshua Kendall, is aptly named The Man Who Made Lists. Kendall claims that Roget found they gave him some solace, created a sense of order in a life full of misfortune, and even prevented him from lapsing into insanity. His father had died of consumption when he was only 4, his grandmother suffered from depression or schizophrenia, his mother was restless, anxious, needy and crazy, and his sister was jilted and spent the rest of her life in a state of misery. In the absence of his father, Roget’s uncle, the radical and greatly admired MP Sir Samuel Romilly, became his much-loved guide and mentor. Then, in 1818, when Roget was a young physician, Romilly, overcome by grief at the death of his wife, cut his own throat, summoned his nephew to his house and died in his arms. The list habit started early with Roget. At the age of 8 he had a notebook in which he listed Latin names and their meanings. Later he started to compile a ‘List of Principal Events’, detailing the milestones in his life, and also a ‘List of Deaths’ of members of the family and friends who meant most to him. Although he is best known to us for the Thesaurus, Roget’s other achievements were just as remarkable, and here I will list just some of them: in the 1820s and ’30s he contributed 300,000 words to the Encyclopaedia Britannica; he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815 for his work in developing a slide rule which was widely in use until the 1970s when the pocket calculator took over; he collaborated in scientific research with Humphry Davy (of the safety lamp); and he was a founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Roget also worked on a project with Jeremy Bentham to develop a ‘frigidarium’, a sort of underground ice house, to store food for the British army fighting in France and also as a means of stabilizing food prices. The enterprise eventually petered out when Bentham became distracted by other interests. Roget’s determination to impose order on everything can sometimes be quite comical. In 1802 John Philips, the owner of the largest cotton mill in Manchester, hired him as travelling tutor to his two teenage sons, Burton and Nathaniel, on a Grand Tour of Europe. Like an Englishman abroad feeling that foreigners have just got things wrong, Roget could be disapproving. He took against the chaos of Paris, particularly because the pavements were uneven and slippery. The shops did not have proper signs.  He went to the Théâtre Français, did not mention the play, but complained that ‘the walls of the pit are very dirty and black’. His two pupils soon picked up the Roget habit. They went to the Louvre, and Nathaniel wrote, ‘The large room contains 209 statues and busts . . . Above this there is a gallery of pictures, and at present there are 980 of them.’ We must be thankful that he did not then list them in alphabetical order. They visited Notre-Dame, and Burton reported that the tower had 360 steps and the organ had 3,800 pipes. As Joshua Kendall remarks in his biography, the boys were taking an inventory of Paris rather than experiencing it. For all his erudition, his scientific curiosity and diligence in other fields, Roget is now most famous for his Thesaurus. When it was first published in 1852 it was an immediate success and it has continued to be so. Tens of millions of copies have been sold.  It is sometimes derided as a prop for the pretentious, or a short-cut for the lazy, or an accessory for those who choose to cheat at crosswords, but it has never been simply a signpost to the mot juste. Open it at random and you will surely find words, and connections between words, that stimulate the imagination and inspire ideas. Above all, it is a magnificent monument to our fascination with lists. In 1885, thirteen years after the publication of the Thesaurus, Gilbert and Sullivan’s most popular opera, The Mikado, opened at the Savoy Theatre in London. It comes as no surprise that the most popular song in The Mikado is the one sung by Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner – ‘I’ve Got a Little List’. And it is no surprise, either, that people have taken delight in adapting and updating that song ever since.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Oliver Pritchett 2016


About the contributor

Oliver Pritchett’s shopping lists have been described by experts as outstanding examples of the genre. There is talk of publishing a collection.

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