![]() ![]() The painter Baron Antoine-Jean Gros captures Napoleon in 1802-the year Roget and the boys began their tour. The timing, it turns out, could not have been worse, and so began a telling adventure in the early life of a man now known worldwide for his lexicography in his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, one of the most influential reference books in the English language. Roget had caught a big break-or so he thought. Accordingly, he introduced his nephew to John Philips, a wealthy cotton mill owner in Manchester, with the plan that Roget would chaperone Philips’ teenage sons, Burton and Nathaniel, who were about to embark on a year-long trip to the continent to study French and prepare for a career in business. With no immediate professional path, he felt unsettled and despondent. Roget had spent the previous four years since his graduation taking additional courses and working odd jobs, even volunteering in the spring of 1799 as a test subject at the Pneumatic Institution in Clifton, England, for a trial of the sedative nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas. He lacked the professional connections that were crucial to a fledgling English physician and was eager for a reprieve from a life largely orchestrated by his widowed mother, Catherine, and his uncle and surrogate father, Samuel Romilly, who together had steered him to study medicine. In January 1802, Peter Mark Roget was an ambivalent young medical school graduate with no clear path. ![]()
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