by Joshua Kendall.

Putnam. 297 pages. $25.95.

By Tony Lewis
Special to the Journal

Joshua Kendall’s fine biography of Peter Mark Roget, The Man Who Made Lists, is less a portrait of the way his subject collected words and listed their synonyms than it is a case study of a psychically wounded compulsive. And that’s as it should be, for Roget’s thesaurus was the product of its creator’s need to categorize, to “make lists,” and not strictly speaking of his love of language.

Like so many word collectors before him — think Samuel Johnson, James Murray (primary compiler of the Oxford English Dictionary), and W.C. Minor, the “madman” who helped Murray — Roget was a bit different right from the get-go. Although his family was well-off (his uncle on his mother’s side, Samuel Romilly, was a prominent member of Parliament), the Rogets and the Romillys were afflicted with debilitating bouts of depression. Romilly, who encouraged and helped his nephew, slit his own throat; Roget’s mother, Catherine, battled the disease throughout her life, as did his grandmother, sister and daughter.

Roget himself, however, was tortured in less dramatic ways. As an obsessive-compulsive, he showed a need to categorize very early in life. As a child he created, as Kendall puts it, a “paracosm”; that is, a kind of “replica of the real world as well as a private imaginary world” that provided him “with the soothing that he wasn’t able to receive from either of his parents.” Roget’s paracosm consisted of concepts that he defined and explained, word lists that he was “compelled to crank out,” perhaps as a way of forestalling madness.

This impulse to order his world resulted in useful compendia, notably Animal and Vegetable Physiology, a two-volume catalog of plants and animals, and then culminated in the extraordinarily popular thesaurus, which was drafted when he was in his 20s but published almost 50 years later. In the intervening years, Roget practiced medicine, lectured brilliantly, and helped to clean up Manchester, the pestilential city where he worked as a doctor at the Royal Infirmary.

As if to demonstrate that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Roget’s good works, his pamphlets and scholarly articles, his scientific research and his thesaurus were opposed throughout his life by a dread of chaos, a pathological disgust at obesity and a horror of filth. And it may indeed be true that Roget used his work primarily to stave off despair, that he wrote clunky prose, had little imagination, and no feel for literature.

But it’s also true that he turned disabilities into assets, and by fitting his talents to his peculiar psychology, made the world a better place for the rest of us. THE MAN WHO MADE LISTS: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus,

antjlewis@yahoo.com