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Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), of Huguenot stock, trained as a physician in Edinburgh and London, yet he was increasingly drawn to the sciences, corresponding with Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes and Humphry Davy. He practised medicine (free of charge) in London at the Northern Dispensary, which he co-founded, and lectured on physiology and medical topics. His Bridgewater Treatise, on animal and vegetable physiology, is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. Roget is remembered today for the present work, first published in 1852 following his retirement from professional duties. As the preface makes clear, he had contemplated such a work for nearly fifty years. It supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged ... according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests.… (more)
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This volume was won as a prize in a literary competition known as Bullets run by the magazine John Bull, a publication of Odhams Press (1933). The originalowner was Harold Jones of 34 York Street, South Bank, Yorks (1952). House and street demolished
Sellotaped to the frontispiece is a press-cutting from I don't know which newspaper, letters to the editor containing rhyming mnemonics for the English kings and queens.
I much prefer this tatty old thesaurus to more modern versions and use it when doing crosswords, as did my Dad before me (and perhaps Uncle Harold but he died when I was small).
There it was in black and white, a way to find the exact word that I wanted.
Hardly a week goes by without my looking something up in it.
A Thesaurus's role is to complement, not replace the inestimable Dictionary: as R.A. Dutch states in the preface (1962), "It furnishes no labels for 'speech level', for what is scholarly, literary or vulgar, or archaic and obsolete" (and certainly this Edition along with me is bordering on that last vestige of practical usefulness that was my ambition and is now for youthful aspiring writers).