The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes by Roger Wilkes Page B

Anderson, tobacconist. Poe was established at $800 a year salary—the greatest sum he would ever earn in his life, and considerably more than his total income from the ten books he would write—as managing editor of a periodical in nearby Philadelphia. The periodical was owned by a reformed comedian named William Burton, who eventually sold it to George Graham, a cabinet-maker turned publisher.
    Poe was retained as editor of Graham’s Magazine , and he worked doggedly in a third-floor cubicle shared with a Swedish assistant, reading and purchasing manuscripts, laying out new issues, and writing criticism and fiction. In short months his industry and ability helped boom the circulation of Graham’s from 5,000 to 37,000. Occasionally, as his duties demanded it, he made the uncomfortable six-hour train trip to New York City. It may be assumed that on these short visits he looked in on John Anderson’s tobacco shop and renewed his acquaintance with Mary Rogers, the attractive clerk behind the counter.
    We do not know the date when Edgar Allan Poe last laid eyes on Mary Rogers. But we do know, approximately, the date when he first saw her name in print. Poe was a habitual reader of the sensational penny papers. Some of his finest fiction was culled from seemingly insignificant news items. Only months before, having read of an escaped orang-utan, he had conceived the world’s first detective story and published it in Graham’s as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Thus it was, in early August of 1841, that Poe consulted his latest batch of New York newspapers and stumbled upon the familiar name of Mary Rogers.
    He came across the bald news item on the second page of the New York Sunday Mercury for 1 August. Since it was often filled with errors, he consulted the other papers. James Gordon Bennett’s gaudy New York Herald for 5 August fully substantiated the Mercury ’s story. We can believe that what Poe read grieved him deeply. For what he read told him that the pretty girl who so often sold him tobacco in the shop on Broadway had been brutally murdered. According to both accounts, Mary Cecilia Rogers was found floating in the Hudson River off Hoboken on Wednesday, 28 July 1841. She had been beaten and strangled, and was quite dead when fished out of the water.
    Poe’s reaction to the crime was no different from that of most decent New Yorkers. True, they were used to murder. Only five years before, at a time when most newspapers thought crime an improper subject to report, James Gordon Bennett, that brash and colourful cross-eyed Scot, had given the New York Herald a circulation of 50,000 with his reporting of the Ellen Jewett case. Miss Jewett, an attractive prostitute, had been bloodily dispatched in a house of ill-fame, and Mr Bennett broke a tradition of journalistic silence on such matters by having a look at the corpse and reporting to all and sundry: “The body looked as white, as full, as polished as the purest Parian marble. The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.” This story broke the ice, and thereafter the constant reader had gore delivered daily at his breakfast.
    Yet, despite this saturation of homicide, the murder of young Mary Rogers affected the citizenry with a shock of dismay. Miss Rogers was not just another anonymous victim. She had been, the woodcuts and columns made plain, a Grecian beauty endowed with every virtue—and virginity besides. She had worked honestly for a living. She had been adored and respected by customers of consequence. She had been the kind of woman one married, or had for sister or daughter. She had been a girl to whom half of New York could be likened. Now she was dead—killed with ferocity, in secret—and now no one was safe.
    We have, fortunately, the typical reaction of a New Yorker of the period. Philip Hone, a cultured, wealthy citizen who dabbled in politics