cover image The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

Amy Gilman Screbnick, Amy G. Srebnick. Oxford University Press, USA, $30 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-19-506237-3

In 1841, beautiful, Connecticut-born, 21-year-old Mary Cecilia Rogers disappeared from her mother's New York City boardinghouse; her badly bruised body was found three days later in the Hudson River. Speculation flourished that she was brutally raped by a gang, or killed by a lone assassin. Later testimony indicated that she had died in a botched abortion; yet, despite the alleged deathbed confession of an innkeeper who oversaw the abortion, her death remained unsolved. Edgar Allen Poe fictionalized the tragedy in his tale ``The Mystery of Marie Roget.'' Journalists and politicians who frequented the Manhattan cigar store where Rogers tended counter made her death a cause celebre. Amid hysteria over crime, New York City passed the Police Reform Act of 1845, allowing closer social and political surveillance; the same year, a state law criminalized abortion. In a mesmerizing, superb study, intriguingly illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, Montclair State University history professor Srebnick uses the Rogers saga to throw a floodlight on sexuality in antebellum America, women's history, urban mass culture, the rise of the popular press and the birth of detective fiction. (Nov.)