The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918O'Brien, Frank Michael
History
The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918
O'Brien, Frank Michael
Sun (New York, N.Y. : 1833)
☞ The body of a young lady some eighteen or twenty years of age
was found in the water at Hoboken. From the description of her
dress, fears are entertained that it is the body of Miss Mary
C. Rogers, who is advertised in yesterday’s paper as having
disappeared from her home, 126 Nassau Street, on Sunday last.
The fears were well grounded, for the dead girl was Mary Cecilia
Rogers, the “beautiful cigar-girl” who had been the magnet at John
Anderson’s tobacco-shop at Broadway and Duane Street; the tragic figure
of Poe’s story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” a tale which served to
keep alive the features of that unsolved riddle of the Elysian Fields
of Hoboken. To the _Sun_, which had then no Poe, no _Sherlock Holmes_,
the murder was the text for a moral lesson:
There can be no question that she had fallen a victim to the
most imprudent and reprehensible practise, which has recently
obtained to a considerable extent in this city, of placing
behind the counters and at the windows of stores for the sale
of articles purchased exclusively by males--especially of
cigar-stores and drinking-houses--young and beautiful females
for the purpose of thus attracting the attention, exciting the
interest (or worse still), and thus inducing the visits and
consequent custom, of the other sex--especially of the young
and thoughtless.
It was by being placed in such a situation, in one of the
most public spots in the city, that this unfortunate girl
was led into a train of acquaintances and associations which
has eventually proved not only her ruin, but an untimely and
violent death in the prime of youth and beauty. From being
used as an instrument of cupidity--as a sort of “man-trap”
to lure by her charms the gay and giddy into the path of the
spendthrift and of constant dissipation--she has become the
victim of the very passions and vices which her exposure to
the public gaze for mercenary gain was so well calculated to
engender and encourage.
The _Sun_ and the other papers might have pursued the Mary Rogers
mystery further than they did had it not been that in a few weeks a
more tangible tragedy presented itself, when John C. Colt, a teacher
of bookkeeping, and the brother of Samuel Colt, the inventor, killed
Samuel Adams, one of the leading printers of New York. Adams had gone
to Colt’s lodgings at Broadway and Chambers Street to collect a bill,
and Colt, who had a furious temper, murdered him with a hammer, packed
the body in a box, and hired an innocent drayman to haul it down to
the ship Kalamazoo, for shipment to New Orleans. This affair drove
the Rogers murder out of the types, and left it for Poe to preserve in
fiction with the names of the characters thinly veiled and the scene
transferred to Paris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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