Today in fiction
On April 29, 1860, Christabel LaMotte disappears from Kernemet.
-- "Possession" (1990)
by A.S. Byatt
From "The Book of Fictional Days"
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Today in Literary HistoryRoget would not have been pleased with this complicity in the creation of the movie camera. Though an academic, he also belonged to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and there was a reformer's zeal behind his industry, a Victorian faith in social and self-improvement. He began compiling his Thesaurus as a personal aid for his own writing, and used it as such for decades; when he retired he began to edit and improve his notes, publishing them 12 years later with the hope that the "repertory of which I had myself experienced the advantage might, when amplified, prove useful to others." He even expressed the hope that his labors might help realize "that splendid aspiration of philanthropists," a universal language. That his work on optics would help make movies that universal language, and help undermine the written word, would have distressed him.
From the very first edition, Roget's Thesaurus was also scorned along these lines, as a book that would do learning and language a disservice rather than improve it. As now, the anti-thesaurians scoffed at the idea that Roget's word-patching could fix a leaky sentence or do anything but dumb us down. To date, over 30 million copies of the book have been sold.
-- Steve King
To find out more about "Today in Literary History," e-mail Steve King.
