THE ANATOMY OF LANGUAGE: THE LANCET WRANGLE THAT HELPED TO SHAPE ROGET’S THESAURUS
 
ROGET, Peter Mark (1779–1869).

Autograph letter signed (“P. M. Roget”), marked “Private”, to Dr William Sharpey, on the Beck–Lee Royal Medal controversy and the public attacks in The Lancet.
 
Autograph letter signed, 3 pp on a single folded sheet of cream mid‑19th‑century notepaper (182 × 114 mm), written on three sides, the final verso blank; headed “Private” and “18 Upper Bedford Place / May 4th 1846” in Roget’s hand, addressed on the final page to “Dr Sharpey”.
 
An unpublished letter from Peter Mark Roget—physician, natural theologian and future author of the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852)—written at the height of the Royal Society “wrangle” over the uterine nervous system that helped push him out of public scientific life and back to a classificatory project first begun in 1805. A project allegedly initiated, at least in part, to help combat long-standing depression. His correspondent, the Scottish anatomist William Sharpey, was then professor of anatomy and physiology at University College London and soon to become Secretary of the Royal Society in 1853, widely regarded as a founding figure of British physiology and eponym of “Sharpey’s fibres”.
 
The letter belongs to the long, bitter dispute between Robert Lee and the Royal Society over priority and method in the anatomy of the uterus. In 1845 the Royal Medal was awarded to Thomas Snow Beck for his work on the nerves of the uterus, a decision Roget and Sharpey were seen to have championed from inside the Society; Lee, whose own research on the uterine nervous system had appeared in the Philosophical Transactions earlier in the decade, mounted a public campaign accusing them of injustice and abuse of process, with The Lancet providing a highly visible platform. The affair ultimately led to reforms in the Society’s system of refereeing and to the resignation of both President and Secretary, Peter Mark Roget in 1848.
 
Writing “Private” from his London address, Roget advises Sharpey on how best to withstand The Lancet’s attacks. Having found “a copy of the paper which I gave to Mr Bell”, he encloses it, and counsels delay before replying in print: “If you intend to write anything in The Lancet in reply to its attack on yourself, I would beg to suggest that it would be advisable for you to wait until the next number … as I have been informed it will contain other letters… By this delay, you will have an opportunity of answering, once for all, the whole of the charges so malignantly brought forwards.” Roget thus positions himself as strategist and handler, coordinating a unified response to the periodical’s “malignant” campaign.
 
The extensive postscript is the letter’s climax. Roget confronts a discrepancy between Thomas Bell’s statement that there was “no report on the papers” and his own assertion that there had been two: “I am correct in my assertion, for I have these two reports, (the one written in August, & other in October) in my possession.” In doing so he reveals that he is personally retaining confidential referee reports as documentary ammunition in the dispute, a practice that goes to the heart of later historical reconstructions of the affair and of nineteenth‑century debates about the secrecy and trustworthiness of Royal Society refereeing.
 
In retrospect, the letter offers a crucial bridge between Roget the embattled scientific administrator and Roget the lexicographer. Having begun, as early as 1805, to keep a private notebook classifying words by meaning, Roget only returned in earnest to this long‑gestating project after withdrawing from medicine and the Royal Society, following the fallout referenced in the present letter and being accused by zoologist, Robert Grant of plagiarism. This ultimately led to the publication of his Thesaurus in 1852; it has remained in print ever since. The present document catches him in the midst of the controversy that helped detach him from institutional science and turn his obsessive instinct for classification toward language—treating words, as it were, as a system of interlocking structures to be anatomised and ordered.
 
Ink strong and unfaded, in Roget’s neat, flowing hand, with contemporary corrections and minor deletions characteristic of working correspondence. Original horizontal mailing folds, very minor and uniform age‑toning, but the paper overall bright, clean, and entirely free of foxing or adhesive staining: a very well‑preserved example.